Oh, I’m Just a Bill (Gates)

Born William Henry Gates III, better known as Bill Gates, the Microsoft mogul has always been down-to-earth and geeky. Though large parts of the computer-using world may have issues with some of Microsoft’s practices, iterations of buggy software, major anti-trust problems, or they’re just die-hard fans of some other company, we all owe something to the Bill Gates era of Microsoft.

Under Gate’s helm, Microsoft has expanded its market from software into hardware, video games, portable media players, television, and home entertainment centers. Gate’s vision from the beginning to diversify and adapt into new markets is certainly still in motion with no signs of stopping soon.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen got started with Microsoft as a partnership back in November 1975, when they named it “Micro-soft,” but within a year had dropped the hyphen. In 1976, “Microsoft” was registered with the USPTO.

Eventually, Microsoft became an independent company from MITS, a company they were working with to develop a BASIC interpreter for the Altair microcomputer. BASIC eventually leaked out in the developer community, and Gates wrote in to a trade magazine to request that developers pay for their copy. Gates believed firmly that they could not continue to make quality software if they did not receive payment.

In the first five years of Microsoft’s opening, Bill Gates reviewed every line of every piece of code that was to be sold, often rewriting it himself to his liking.

IBM approached Gates in 1980 about developing BASIC for their new personal computer, and in their talks mentioned they needed an operating system. Gates founded a deal that would make Microsoft the eventual owner of 86-DOS (QDOS), which they packaged for IBM as PC-DOS for a paltry sum of $80,000. Gates, in one of the smartest moves in PC history, made IBM let him keep the copyright for MS-DOS, under the presumption that other hardware makers would clone the IBM hardware and want to license MS-DOS. He was right, and it shot Microsoft straight into stardom.

In 1981, Gates started Microsoft on a little project called “Windows,” and when it shipped out in 1985, IBM partnered with Microsoft to start work on another little project called “OS/2.” In 1991, however, Gates sent out a memo to let employees know the honeymoon was over, the OS/2 partnership had ended, and now Microsoft would focus heavily on the NT Kernel.

After several versions of Windows up to 3.11 for Workgroups, Microsoft finally completely re-vamped the OS into something completely different: Windows 95. 95 re-thought the way users would navigate the operating system, and how they thought about the filesystem in general.

Windows 98 was a significant upgrade in ability and speed, but still left room for improvement in areas like the emerging USB technologies. A temporary fix, Windows 98 Second Edition was sold almost like a whole new operating system, and was probably the closest predecessor to the Service Packs Microsoft would later release for free.

For fear of crashing this web site, I will only speak briefly about Windows Millennium Edition (Me). A great deal of hype surrounded the massive “improvements” that were supposed to be included with ME. That’s mostly what it amounted to – hype. ME ended up being a troublesome, buggy, released-too-early edition that was pushed out primarily to satiate users waiting for the next revision codenamed Luna, and was more of a prettier interface than any significant useful feature.

Windows XP was released a few years later, after many had already reverted back to Windows 98 or gone on to Windows NT or 2000 (which at the time was more for networked or server environments). At first, XP received slow adoption. Over the years, it became fairly ubiquitous on the PC platform. Now with Vista having been out for over a year, many users are sticking with or “Upgrading” back to Windows XP.

Bill Gates is more than just a software mogul, he’s an author, a philanthropist, and a family man. With his recent retirement, many wonder if this prominent figure in computer history will leave behind a legacy that will stand the test of time. Gates has been out of the picture as the leader of Microsoft for a couple of years now, with a lot of decision making power going to Steve Ballmer. Gates will continue to sit on the board of investors, holding more than 51% of the shares still.

The shoes Gates left behind are being filled by not one, but at least three more people. That’s the kind of legacy you want to leave when you retire from somewhere. Not just that they’ll hard time replacing you, but that they have to replace you with three people.

Farewell, Bill, I’m sure this isn’t the last we’ve heard of you by any means.

-The Raging Tech