Feature

Goodbye Bill Gates....

Compiled by Mahdin Mahboob

WILLIAM Henry Gates III, popularly known as Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, the man who had brought to us the world's most popular Operating System, 'Windows', and several times ranked as the 'richest man in the world', has retired from service. The Co-Chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Gates has sighted reasons of concentrating harder on charity work as the cause of his retirement. Relating to Spider-man's most popular dialogue known to all of us, Gates has been quoted as saying, “Great wealth brings with it great responsibility.”

Sensing the start of a personal computer revolution, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard University in 1975 to start Microsoft Corporation and pursue a vision of a computer on every desk and in every home. Three decades later, Gates stepped down from what is now the world's largest software company to work full-time at the charitable organisation - the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - built by his vast fortune.

The 52-year-old, whose boyish looks seem at odds with his greying hair, leaves behind a life's work developing software to devote energy to finding new vaccines or to micro-finance projects in the developing world. However, as Microsoft's biggest shareholder, Gates remains chairman and will work on special technology projects. His 8.7% stake in Microsoft is worth about 23 billion US Dollars!

Gates first programmed a computer at 13, creating a class scheduling system for his Seattle high school. As he gained more experience, he realised the potential that software held to change how humans worked, played and communicated. He realised at an early stage of the PC revolution that software would gradually become more important than hardware. Working with boyhood friend Paul Allen, Gates founded Microsoft, naming the company for its mission of providing microcomputer software.

Gates was born October 28, 1955, the second of three children in a prominent Seattle family. His father, William Henry Gates Jr, was a partner at one of the city's most powerful law firms, while his late mother, Mary, was an active charity fundraiser and University of Washington.

He was introduced to computers at the exclusive Lakeside Preparatory School, where the teen prodigy began programming in BASIC computer language on a primitive ASR-33 Teletype unit.

It was at Lakeside that Gates met Allen, a student two years his senior who shared his fascination with computers.

During his two years at Harvard, Gates devoted much of his time to programming marathons and all-night poker sessions before dropping out to work on software for the Altair, a clunky desktop computer.

Also at Harvard, Gates became friends with an ebullient Detroit native who shared his love of maths and cynical humour.

Gates eventually talked that classmate, current CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, into leaving business school to join Microsoft.

Gates dropped out of Harvard and relocated with Allen to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where they established Microsoft.

Their big break came in 1980 when Gates and his carelessly dressed young colleagues signed an agreement to build the operating system that became known as MS-DOS for IBM (International Business Machines) Corp's new personal computer.

In a critical blunder by IBM, Microsoft was allowed to license the operating system to others, spawning an industry of 'IBM-compatible' machines dependent on Microsoft software.

Microsoft went public in 1986 in one of the most celebrated offerings of its time.

By the next year, the soaring stock made Gates, at age 31, the youngest self-made billionaire.

Microsoft grew to dominate its industry and became the target of a landmark anti-trust case, which it fought every step of the way before eventually settling with US prosecutors.

Lance Ulanoff, Editor-in-Chief of PC Magazine said Gates will be remembered as someone who had a huge impact on people's lives.

“I think Bill Gates will grow in stature over time. He's had tremendous impact, not just on technology but really on our lives.

If you think about the way we lived our lives in the 70s and the early 80s and how we do now and how we are constantly sitting in front of a computer, we are typing on a keyboard, we have technology with us all the time, and a lot of that has to do with what he envisioned way back when.

And people will understand that while there were things that weren't so great about what Microsoft has done and even what Bill Gates did, by and large what he did was very good and very valuable to society,” he said.