PERSON
Bill Gates
Co-founder of Microsoft (1975, with Paul Allen). Beginning with BASIC for the Altair 8800, he led the strategy by which Microsoft came to dominate both the OS and the productivity-software layers of the PC market through MS-DOS, Windows, and Office. He handed the CEO role to Steve Ballmer in 2000, and from 2008 onward centred his work on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Profile
- Born
- 1955
- Status
- Living
- Span
- 71 years
- Appearances
- 03
- Name
- ENBill GatesJAビル・ゲイツ
Appearances
- April 4, 1975Microsoft FoundedBill Gates and Paul Allen founded the company in Albuquerque to sell their BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800. The original name was 'Micro-Soft'—with a hyphen. A year later, Gates' 1976 'Open Letter to Hobbyists', written in response to widespread piracy of Altair BASIC, became one of the earliest articulations of the idea of commercial software, and a symbolic document in the history of the industry.
- August 12, 1981MS-DOS 1.0 — Shipping with the IBM PCMicrosoft adapted 86-DOS (formerly QDOS), which it had bought from Seattle Computer Products, and shipped it as PC DOS 1.0 with the IBM PC. Crucially, Microsoft retained the right to sell the same software, as MS-DOS, to any other compatible-machine manufacturer. Bill Gates' licensing strategy here produced the next fifteen years of PC OS dominance.
- August 24, 1995Windows 95 Released32-bit preemptive multitasking, long file names, plug-and-play, and—most lastingly—the Start menu and taskbar. For many people the image of 'what a PC is' was set by this product. The campaign built around the Rolling Stones' 'Start Me Up' and the midnight launches drew lines around the block; the PC had become a household appliance. Seven million copies were sold in the first week.