Bill GatesWilliam Henry Gates, III was born on October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington. He was the middle child of three children born to William and Mary Gates. ATrey,@ as he was called because of the III, was sent to a private school by his father, a lawyer, and his mother, a former teacher now on several prestigious boards (Moritz, 238). By the age of 13, Bill had taught himself programming after taking a computer class. After earning a perfect 800 on the math half of the SAT, he graduated from Lakeside School and enrolled in Harvard University with a law major. As a student, Gates was a marvel. He got an A in an economics class without taking it or studying the night before the final exam. In June 1975, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to pursue a career in computers full-time. Later that year, after dropping out of Harvard, he moved to New Mexico. There he and Allen Kay founded Microsoft to produce their Basic for MITS. Eighteen months later they were a few hundred thousand dollars richer and were hired by Tandy to develop software for his computer radios. Gates and Allen then moved their headquarters to Seattle, Washington. In Seattle, Gates rewrote an operating system and called it MS-DOS, which stands for Microsoft Disk Operating System. Microsoft would eventually sell the rights to MS-DOS to IBM, making it a major computer company. Other computer companies wanted Microsoft to produce software for their computers, including Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple computers. Once the operating system was established, Gates and Microsoft began creating application software for tasks such as financial analysis or word processing. Microsoft has continued to be successful over the years and will continue to be successful in the future as long as! continues to innovate new and exciting computer software. Bill Gates has his eyes turned to the future. He sees the world as a powerful, high-speed network, both within companies and across the so-called information superhighway@ (Brandt, 57). It hopes to be at the forefront of the transformation from personal computers to networks. Gates predicts that an explosion of low-cost, high-capacity networks will fundamentally change the way we use technology over the next decade. Now, before Bill Gates came on the scene in the early seventies, the main focus in the computer world was hardware. Chips, circuit boards, capacitors... in the middle of paper... a hedgehog called Sonic, is the hottest property in the industry.@ In addition to Sega, AMr. Gates also talked to Time Warner and TCI about creating a company, known as CableSoft, that would set standards for interactive TV.@(The Economist, 73)Bill Gates and his company Microsoft have been leading the rapid changing the computer industry for much of its existence. If profit margins and stock prices continue to grow and Microsoft products continue to be household names, the two will remain in this position well into the future.Bibliography1. Manes, Stefano; Andrews, Paul; Gates - How the Microsoft tycoon reinvented an industry and made himself the richest man in America. Doubleday 19932. AA Trojan hedgehog@, The Economist. January 22, 1994, p.73-743. High noon for Billy the Kid?@, The Economist. June 24, 1995, P.59-604. Amaro, Gary G. AWillian H. Gates.@ Macmillan Computer Encyclopedia. Macmillan Publishing: New York, NY, 1992, P.409-410.5. Brandt, Richard. ABill Gate=s Vision.@ Business Week. June 27, 1994, P.56-62.6. Moritz, Carlo. AWilliam Gates.@ Current bio. H.W. Wilson Company: New York, NY, 1991, P.237-241.