INNOVATION

The year was 1974. Fuel shortages had led to a new 55 mph national speed limit. Congress was preparing impeachment proceeding against President Nixon. U.S. troops had pulled out of Vietnam, but Saigon had not yet fallen. Digital Equipment Corp. had pushed its way into the Fortune 500 listing of the nation’s top companies as its powerful, popular new PDP minicomputers challenged the market dominance of IBM’s bulky, expensive mainframes. Bill Gates (at lower left in photo) was a freshman at Harvard. His friend and fellow software enthusiast, Paul Allen, had driven cross-country from Seattle to Boston to take a minicomputer programming job at Honeywell. They had been fascinated by computers since they first met at Lakeside School in Seattle. There, calling themselves the Lakeside Programming Group, they had agreed to help a local computer company with debugging PDP-10 software in exchange for access to its minicomputer. As they gained experience, Gates and Allen had written scheduling software for the school, a payroll program for a company in Portland, Oregon, and software for a traffic-count analysis machine, the Traf-O-Data, for the Washington State Department of Transportation.

One spring day in 1974, Gates and Allen looked in the latest edition of Electronics magazine and spotted an announcement of a new computer chip from Intel – the 8080. It was 10 times more powerful than Intel’s 8008 chip in the Traf-O-Data that they had just written software for. The new chip also cost less than $200. To the two friends, it seemed obvious that if a tiny chip could be so powerful, the end of big unwieldy computers was near.

INVENTION

The richest man in the world once stated that, “Back when I was a teenager, I envisioned the impact that low-cost computers could have. ‘A computer on every desk and in every home' became Microsoft's corporate mission, and we have worked to help make that possible” (“Microsoft bio” p. 1). He has succeeded in his quest, his company Microsoft becoming the largest in the world. Few men have changed the way the entire world operates. Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were just a couple of the small number of people that have met this challenge. However, when thinking of the biggest impact on the world within the last 30 years, it is hard not to credit the impact of Bill Gates and his company Microsoft with the invention of an easy accessible operating system for computers.

Bill Gates was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle (Microsoft, p. 2). During his years at public school, Gates was not challenged and lost interest in school. He was somewhat of a troublemaker, and his parents decided to move him to a place that would be more challenging. He transferred to a private school, Lakeside Elementary. It was here that he discovered his passion for computers after trying a newly purchased computer that at this school (Personal History). A friend helped him write his first program at this age, and Gates never stopped after that. In high school, he helped the staff write programs for payroll. After this success, Bill co-founded a company with friend Steve Allen that helped the government track street traffic patterns (Britannica 2002). In 1972, after finishing up high school, both Allen and Gates went off to college Harvard University. It was here that he met Steve Ballmer, and the dream for Microsoft started becoming a reality.

Gates and his high school friend Allen started developing software for the very first microcomputer. The finished language was a form the language called Basic, MS-BASIC, and is still a programming language used today (Biography, p. 2). After finishing the language, the two sold it for about $100,000 to a company called MITS. After his sophomore year, both Gates and Allen felt they could have greater success in the business environment, so they left Harvard in 1975 and founded a small programming company called Microsoft (Lesinski 30). Gates had boasted he would become a millionaire by the age of 30, but little did he know how much money he would amass when at that young age.

NOVELTY

Bill Gates making his breakthrough as a conceptual innovator, age 19

The year was 1974. Fuel shortages had led to a new 55 mph national speed limit. Congress was preparing impeachment proceeding against President Nixon. U.S. troops had pulled out of Vietnam, but Saigon had not yet fallen. Digital Equipment Corp. had pushed its way into the Fortune 500 listing of the nation’s top companies as its powerful, popular new PDP minicomputers challenged the market dominance of IBM’s bulky, expensive mainframes. Bill Gates (at lower left in photo) was a freshman at Harvard. His friend and fellow software enthusiast, Paul Allen, had driven cross-country from Seattle to Boston to take a minicomputer programming job at Honeywell. They had been fascinated by computers since they first met at Lakeside School in Seattle. There, calling themselves the Lakeside Programming Group, they had agreed to help a local computer company with debugging PDP-10 software in exchange for access to its minicomputer. As they gained experience, Gates and Allen had written scheduling software for the school, a payroll program for a company in Portland, Oregon, and software for a traffic-count analysis machine, the Traf-O-Data, for the Washington State Department of Transportation.

One spring day in 1974, Gates and Allen looked in the latest edition of Electronics magazine and spotted an announcement of a new computer chip from Intel – the 8080. It was 10 times more powerful than Intel’s 8008 chip in the Traf-O-Data that they had just written software for. The new chip also cost less than $200. To the two friends, it seemed obvious that if a tiny chip could be so powerful, the end of big unwieldy computers was near.