Bill Gates Biography
...ipe old age of 13. By the time he got to highschool Gates and his friend Paul Allen founded a company called Traf-O-Data. It sold traffic counting systems to state governments and his business also computerized his schools payroll system. He was very successful in high school and enrolled in Harvard University. In his second year at Harvard, Gates, Paul Allen, and Monte Davidoff wrote a computer program called Altair BASIC, which operated the Altair 8800. Shortly into his third year at Harvard Gates dropped out to pursue a career in software development. Gates later read an article about the Altair 8800 in a magazine and decided to inform the company that created the Altair that they had developed the program BASIC for it. They convinced the company to buy the rights to the program BASIC. It was at this point that Gates and Paul Allen dropped out of Harvard and founded the company Micro-Soft, which they later changed to Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft began to write operating systems and software applications for various companies. In the 80's they developed Microsoft Windows which was very similar to Apple’s graphical user interface. At first the program did not sell well, however in the later 80's Windows began to come pre-installed on many computers. With the release of Windows 3.0 in 1990, Microsoft became a tremendous success selling about 10 million copies. Microsoft eventually kept on innovating and improving their product becoming the largest software company in the world. Gates served as the CEO of the company into 1998 where he gave up his position to become the Chief Software Architect, which he titled himself. With Gates as CEO, Microsoft had been accused of aggressive business practices and was tried in a court as law in the case of United States v. Microsoft. It alleged that Microsoft has abused it’s power by creating a monopoly over the operating systems and sale of web browsers. They were accused of trying to smother Netscape, it’s rival, by offering a clone of Netscape’s software for free. He was very evasive and didn’t give out much information while on trial. He repeated the words “I don’t recall” enough time’s that the judge even laughed at him. Gate...