Last month, we discussed about success story of Elon Musk, today we will discuss the success story of Bill Gates which is an inspiration to the youth.
William Henry Gates III is the second richest man on earth, with the net worth of $100.6 billion. He is an American entrepreneur, philanthropist, programmer, and an investor. Together with Paul Allen, Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft, which is the number one software company in the world.
Before The Success
Bill Gates was born on 28th October 1955, to a well-heeled business, political as well as a community service family. His father William H. Gates Sr, an accomplished attorney and Mary Maxwell Gates, his mother, who is a member of the board of directors of the First Interstate Bank.
From a very early age, Gates has a keen interest in business, especially in mathematics. In 1968, when Gates was in middle school with Paul Allen, his school administration bought a computer from a company called General Electric Company. During this time the system was based on Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and Program Data Processor (PDP) – 10 micro architecture. Gates was only 13 at this time, he and his friends spent most of their time writing programs to figure out how to make a computer do different functions. Soon, they had investigated all the complexities of the micro-architecture and found its weaknesses, breaking their defense system.
In 1971, the information Sciences hired Gates and Paul Allen to make software for a living. The young programmers fueled with motivation started selling their developed software to various clients. For example, he created a software to regulate road traffic and sold it for $20,000. He was only 15 years old at that time.
The Birth Of Microsoft.
In 1975, without a written program, Gates contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the founder of new microcomputers about a BASIC interpreter. They were requested to give a demonstration. They developed an Altair emulator and a BASIC interpreter in a week. After a successful demonstration, both Gates and Allen were hired. They named their partnership Micro-Soft. Later IBM approached Gates to write a BASIC interpreter for the new IBM PC. So Gates suggested using 86-DOS owned by SCP, and Microsoft made a deal with SCP to become the licensing agent and later owning 86-DOS completely. After building the operating system Microsoft delivered PC DOS to IBM for $50,000.
Microsoft became a major player after the booming sales of MS-DOS. The company was reconstructed in June of 1981, where Gates became the president and board chairman. Microsoft launched its first wholesale version of Microsoft Windows in 1985. Since 1975, Microsoft has dominated the software market and remained the number one software company in the world.
Bill Gate’s story teaches us that with a strong mentality and self determination a person can achieve anything. Bill Gates did not build the first operating system that IBM used; he just bought the licensing rights from SCP and modified it to propound the company that Microsoft is today. In a similar way, we should also do something that we are passionate about and venture around that. Just like Gates, we just have to find that thing we are zealous about and change it till it gives us an excellent result.
In next success series, we will discuss about Jeff Bezos and his leadership styles.