Essay Bill Gates

Submitted By yayas15
Words: 1010
Pages: 5

Yadira Santana
Period. 1
Mis.Rickey
Final Draft
5-9-13
Bill Gates Bill Gates has many professions like being an American Magnate, programmer, inventor, and philanthropist. In 2008, Bill Gate was ranked as the third wealthiest Americans however in 2011; he was the wealthiest American and the second wealthiest person alive. But there is so much more to Bill Gates than all his riches. Gates had many challenges and failures before he became the successful person he’s known today. Bill Gates even receives criticism for his business tactics. It’s never been easy for him, but he conquered all of these challenges to become the wealthy person people know him to be today.
On October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington, William Henry Gates (also known as Bill Gates) was born. Gates grew up into a middle-class family with two sisters Kristina (his older sister) and Libby (his younger sister). His father, William Henry Gates Sr. was a successful attorney and his mother, Mary Gates, worked as a former school teacher. They encouraged their kids to be competitive and to strive for excellence at a young age. At age thirteen Gates parents enrolled him in Seattle’s Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school. While attending Lakeside School Gates found his love for computers. When the school purchased a teletype terminal for the students to use Gates spent most of his free time working on the terminal. At age thirteen he created a tic-tac-toe program in basic computer code that let the users play against a computer. At Lakeside he met Paul Allen, his soon-to-be business partner in a multi-billion worth company. In 1970, at the age of fifteen Gates developed a computer programed called “Traf-o-data” that monitored traffic patters in Seattle with his friend Allen. They received $20,000 for their efforts. Both Gates and Allen wanted to quit school and start their own business however; their parents would not let them. Gates then graduated in 1973, with a scored of 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT test.
After high school, Gates went off to Harvard University to study a career in law however, during his freshman year he spent most of his time with the computers in the computer lab than he did in class. In the summer of 1974 he went to visit his old friend Paul Allen in Boston, Massachusetts. During this time the men learned about the Altair 880 mini-computer kit. They became fascinated with the thought of what this computer could do towards personal computing. Gates and Allen contacted the company saying that there were working on a BASIC software program that could run the Altair computer. The president of the company Ed Roberts asked them for a demonstration. Gates and Allen scrambled and spent the next two months making software at Harvard’s computer lab. Allen later traveled to New Mexico to try the software on an Altair computer for the first time. The company, in seeing that it worked, hired Allen. Gates soon left Harvard to work with his friend. In 1975, Gates and Allen formed a partnership they called Micro-soft (a year later they dropped the hyphen).
After years of trying to become successful, Gates is known to have an estimated wealth of $65 billion! With the influences of his wife Melinda (whom he married in January 1994 in Hawaii) Gates wanted to take his wealth and fulfilling his mother’s role as a civic leader (who had died in June of 1994). Gates began studying the philanthropist work of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Gates saw all the poverty that was going on in the world. With seeing the poverty first hand Gates wanted to make a change.
Bill Gates saw that starvation, education, diseases and so much more, were things the government didn’t look into as much as they should have been. He noticed the