Born
in 1955, Gates attended public elementary school, and enrolled in the private
Lakeside School at age 12. The following year, Gates wrote his first computer
program, at a time when computers were still room-sized machines run by scientists
in white coats. Soon afterwards, he and his friend Paul Allen wrote a scheduling
program for the school. Gates set off for Harvard University intending
to become a lawyer like his father. Still shy and awkward, he rarely ventured
out to parties unless dragged by his friend Steve Ballmer, whom he later repaid
by naming him president of Microsoft. One day in December 1974, Allen, who
was working at Honeywell outside of Boston, showed Gates a Popular Mechanics cover
featuring the Altair 8800, a 7 computer from M.I.T.S. computing that any hobbyist
could build. The only thing the computer lacked, besides a keyboard and monitor,
was software. Gates and Allen contacted the head of M.I.T.S. and said they could
provide a version of BASIC for the Altair. After a successful demonstration
at the company's Albuquerque headquarters, M.I.T.S. contracted with Gates
and Allen for programming languages. The pair moved to New Mexico and started
Micro-soft. Although the company's first five clients went bankrupt, the company
struggled on, moving to Seattle in 1979. The following year, IBM asked Gates to
provide an operating system for its first personal computer. Gates purchased a
system called QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) for ,000 from another
company, changed the name to MS-DOS, and licensed it to IBM. The IBM PC took the
market by storm when it was introduced in 1981. Microsoft continued concentrating
on the software market, adding consumer applications like Microsoft Word and Microsoft
Excel. In 1986, when the company went public, Gates became a billionaire at the
age of 31. The following year, the company introduced its first version of Windows,
and by 1993 it was selling a million copies a month. When Windows 95 was introduced
in August 1995, seven million copies were sold in the first six weeks alone. Microsoft's
software became so ubiquitous that the U.S. Justice Department began a
series of long-lasting antitrust investigations against the company. In
1995, Gates dramatically changed the direction of the entire company and focused
on the Internet. In November 1999, the U.S. District Court issued a preliminary
decision that the software giant was a monopoly, signaling continued trouble
for both Gates and the Microsoft Corporation. Shortly after the ruling, Gates
stepped down as Microsoft's CEO and assumed the position of chairman and chief
software architect. Under the 1999 ruling, Microsoft was required to release
the Windows 2000 operating code to manufacturers. In April 2000, the Justice
Department proposed that Microsoft should be divided into two companies. One company
would develop software mainstays like Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer,
while the other would solely concentrate on the Windows operating systems (which
currently run on 85% of the world's computers). And in late July 2001 a federal
appeals court unanimously overturned the lower court's order to break
up Microsoft. With a reported fortune of billion, Gates
retained the top spot in a 2001 Forbes magazine survey of the 400 wealthiest Americans.
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set off for:向某地出发、动身
Albuquerque:阿尔布开克(美国新墨西哥州中部一城市)
Ubiquitous:到处存在的,普遍存在的 antitrust investigations:反垄断调查
preliminary
decision:初审判决 operating code:系统操作解码
unanimously:无异议地;全体一致地 break up:分拆 fortune:财产 |