Bill Gates – Secrets Of Success

Bill Gates holds the 3rd position in 10 richest people list.

If you want to be one of the top rich people of the world, you have to act like one, think like one, and live like one. Here is the story of one of the richest people in the world.

Quick Review

• Date of Birth: October 28, 1955 (age 65)
• Nationality: American
• Children: 3
• Spouse: Melinda Gates (m. 1994)
• Business/es:
  • Microsoft
  • Cascade Investment
• Wealth (2020): $ 118.7 billion

Inspiring Story

William Henry Gates III or “Trey”, also known as Bill Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, on October 28, 1955. His parents are William H. Gates Sr. (b. 1925) and Mary Maxwell Gates (1929–1994). We will discuss his family and background in some other article, here our focus is his success story.

Points to Ponder

Let me make a few things clear. Bill Gates was not a weak student. He was not running away from his studies. His mother never received any mail from his school telling her that his son was struck-off because he was bad at studies. Yeah, he was spending more time on the computer than most of the students at that time. He was bargaining time from his school for a computer program. Besides, he was working on computer games. But if little Johnny skips his classes and spends more and more time on the computer, it doesn’t mean that he is going to be one of the richest people in the future, because Gates wrote his software program when he was just 13.

Fun Fact

When it comes to gaming, he is the one who wrote his first computer program on the GE system in BASIC, an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. (Fun fact: Gate was allowed to skip his math classes for the game development, isn’t that fun, skips math for gaming.).

        Early life

Let’s begin his story. When he was 13, he enrolled in Lakeside prep school (private school).  In eighth grade, his school arranged Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for students. Gates was interested in programming the GE system in the BASE (a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages). On this, he wrote his first computer program that allowed human vs computer games (tic-tac-toe).

After that, he worked on DEC PDP minicomputers along with other students. Actually, his school could no longer fund the computer program,  leading Gates and other students here. There happened a funny story. One of the systems (PDP-10) belonged to Computer Center Corporation (CCC) on which Gates and his three friends, obsessed by programming, were exploiting bugs for extra computer time. They were caught and got banned.

      Business Career

These students formed their own Programmers Club to make money. When the ban ended, CCC offered to find bugs in their software in exchange for extra computer time. Gate was tired of Teletype, so he went to CCC’s office. He learned source code for various programs available on that system, for example, Lisp, Fortran, and machine language.

In 1970, CCC went out of business and next year a Lakeside teacher assigned Bill Gates and Kent Evans (Gates’s first business partner and best friend) for automation of the school’s class-scheduling system. They were provided with computer time and royalties. They made it ready to be used next year but here Kent Evans died in a mountain climb, leaving Gates in deep grief. Gates finished his task with the help of Paul Allen.

At the age of 17, Bill Gates, Paul Gilbert, and Paul Allen established Traf-O-Data to read the raw data from roadway traffic counters and create reports for traffic engineers. It only worked for three years (1972-1975), but it’s experienced greatly helped Bill Gates in the creation of Microsoft.

In 1972, he was serving as a congressional page in the House of Representatives.

In 1973, he earned the National Merit Scholarship when he graduated from Lakeside School. Also, he did the SAT with 1590 out of 1600 scores and enrolled at Harvard. There he met Steven Anthony Ballmer, his future (2000-2014) CEO of Microsoft and owner of the Los Angeles Clippers of National Basketball Association (NBA).

Once in a combinatorics class, Professor Harry Lewis presented a series of unsolved problems. As a solution, Bill Gates came up with an algorithm for pancake sorting. This system remained unmatchable for the next 30 years. The new system is only 2% faster than that.

        Microsoft

Altair BASIC

In 1974, Bill Gates joined Paul Allen at Honeywell International Inc.

In 1975, the release of MIITS Altair 8800 (based on the Intel 8080 CPU) urged Bill Gates and Allen to start their own computer software company.at first, Allen named it “micro-soft”  but a year later, it was registered as “Microsoft”.

The Same year Bill Gates and Allen developed an Altair emulator for MIITS that operated on minicomputers and the BASIC interpreter. Allen was hired by MIITS and Bill Gates joined him. This is where Microsoft was born. In late 1976, Microsoft became independent of MIITS, and it continued to develop programming language software for various systems.

IBM partnership

In July 1980, IBM approached Microsoft. They needed an operating system and software for their upcoming microcomputer. Microsoft hired Tim Paterson who had developed an operating system, 86-DOC, and provided that operating system to IBM, and later to other companies. At that time, Microsoft was introduced to the world through the computer press as a fast developing and influential corporation. In August 1986, the company had a deal with IBM to develop a separate operating system called OS/2. After the first successful version of the new system, their deal could no longer go on due to mounting creative differences.

Microsoft Equity

Gates’ and Allen’s partnership was suffering from conflict nut in early 1983, Allen resigned because of Hodgkin Lymphoma, leaving Gates as CEO and owner of Microsoft. They reunited soon and remain friends until Allen’s death in October 2018.

Windows and Microsoft Excel

Microsoft, on November 20, 1985, launched its first retail version of Microsoft Windows, which has been the soul of microcomputers since then. Same year Bill Gates announced Microsoft Excel.

Philanthropy

On 15 June 2006,  Bill Gates divided responsibilities between two successors when he placed Ray Ozzie in charge of management and Craig Mundie in charge of long-term product strategy and dedicated his time for philanthropy.