Bill Gates Biography Part II

Administrator Mon 08 Aug, 2016

Law. But his freshman year saw him spend more of his time in the computer lab than in class. Gates did not really have a study regimen. Instead, he could get by on a few hours of sleep, cram fot test, and pass with a reasonable grade.

Gates remained in contact with Paul Allen, who, after attending Washington State University for two years, dropped out and moved to Boston, Massachusetts, to work for Honeywell. In the summer of 1974, Gates joined Allen at Honeywell. During this time, Allen showed Gates an edition of Popular Electronics magazine featuring an article on the Altair 8800 mini-computer kit. Both boys were fascinated with the possibilities that this computer could create in the world of personal computing. The Altair was made by a small company in Albuquerque, New Mexico, called Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS). Gate and Allen contacted the company, proclaiming that the were working on a BASIC software program that would run the Altair computer. In reality, they didn’t have an Altair to work with or the code to run in. But they wanted to know if MITS was interested in someone developing such software. MITS was, and its president Ed Roberts asked the boys for a demonstration. Gates and Allen scrambled, spending the next two months writing the software at Harvard’s computer lab. Allen traveled to Albuquerque for a test run at MITS, never having tried it out on an Altair computer. It worked perfectly. Allen was hired at MITS and Gates soon left Harvard to work with him, much to his parents’ dismay. In 1975, Gates and Allen formed a parnership the called Micro-Soft, a blend of “micro-computer” and “software”.

Microsoft (Gates and Allen dropped the hypen in less than year) started off on shaky footing. Though their BASIC software program tor the Altair computer netted the company a fee and royalties, it wasn’t meeting their overhead. Microsoft’s BASIC software was popular with computer hobbyists who obtained pre-market copies and were reproducting and distributing the for free. According to Gate’s later account, only about 10 percent of people using BASIC in the Altair computer had actually paid for it. At this time, much of personal computer enthusiasts were peopel not in it for the money. They felt the ease of reproduction and distribution allowed the to share software with friends and fellow computer enthusiasts. Bill Gates thought differently. He saw the free distribution of software as stealing, especially when it involved software that was created to be sold.

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