By Andy Goldberg Jun 24, 2008, 2:37 GMT
San Francisco - There was nothing portentous when the mothers of the prestigious Lakeside School in Seattle held a bake sale in 1969 to raise money to buy a new-fangled terminal and some mainframe computer time for the pupils to experiment on.
But for one child in particular it was a godsend. William Gates III, a slight and nerdy child, had been bored to tears throughout his school career, but when he started fooling around on the computer it was clear that he had found his calling.
Soon he had written his first programme - a game of noughts and crosses - and was so enamoured of the possibilities that when the mothers' bloc of computer time ran out Gates along with four other students hacked into another mainframe.
Initially they got into trouble, but soon the computer owners were using the bright young students to debug the machine. Gates also wrote a scheduling programme for his school - and claimed to have used it to place himself in classes with the most girls.
Gates and his fellow Lakeside student Paul Allen were soon using their skills to make money - and lots of it.
In 1972, they formed a venture called Traf-O-Data to use computer sensors to count traffic. They made 20,000 dollars their first year, but as Gates moved on to Harvard University the dynamic duo were already eyeing more ambitious achievements.
When Gates read about the first affordable home computer in 1975 he contacted the manufacturer and offered to provide them with an operating system. Surprised to receive a positive response, Gates and Allen reworked an existing program BASIC to run on the Altair. They won the deal and formed Microsoft.
They repeated the trick in 1980 when IBM was looking for an operating system for its personal computers.
Bill Gates will end his full time job Friday, giving up his full time role at Microsoft and his title as executive chairman. But he will retain the title of chairman and plans to work for Microsoft one day a week.
As has been pointed out many times, their brilliance was not in inventing anything. They licensed existing programs and on a hunch that the IBM PC would be cloned, struck a deal to get a royalty on every operating system sold.
By 1985, the company had revenues of more than 150 million dollars, and after the company went public the next year, Gates became the youngest self-made billionaire in US history at the age of 31.
But Gates didn't become the world's richest man by being satisfied with a mere billion. Like all truly successful people he was motivated by more than money.
Critics maintain he is obsessively driven to ruthlessly rout competitors by means fair or foul.
His friends say his true motivation is his original vision of personal computers helping individuals and organizations leverage their power. Or as Microsoft's mission statement put it: To enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential.
What is in no doubt is that as Windows became the overwhelmingly dominant operating system for PCs, Microsoft used its market muscle to establish other products like Office, and after Gates' 1995 warning of the 'internet tidal wave', Internet Explorer.
Certainly Gates did not distinguish himself in the antitrust trial over that programme's destruction of its main rival with answers that were evasive and often disrespectful to the legal system.
But both views of Gates probably have value. George F Colony, the founder and chief executive of research company Forrester, said love him or hate him, the tech world would not have been the same without Gates. He credits the software magnate not only with realizing the potential of PCs, but also with realizing that monopolistic software would greatly enhance that power by setting de facto standards.
'Bill had the vision to see this future and he possessed the competitive drive to force his technologies into monopoly positions in the marketplace,' Colony said. 'He has not been an innovator in technology - in polite circles we would call him derivative, in less gentile terms we would call him a plagiarist. Gates has been a business innovator, not a technology innovator.'
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