Bill Gates: The Successful Journey
Jake Roach
ENGL 1213
Ms. Just
February 27 2012

Bill Gates: The Successful Journey
One of the wealthiest people in the world and a widely known computer genius is Bill Gates. Gates grew up a very studious and educated child, excelling in whatever he put his mind to. He had an extremely successful career and is now a very influential person. Through technological innovation, business strategy, and competitive tactics, Gates built the world's largest software business, Microsoft, and became one of the richest men in the world.
Early Life
William Henry Gates III was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington. His father, William Henry Gates Jr., was a successful corporate lawyer, and his mother, Mary Maxwell, was chairwoman of United Way International (2001). At the age of 12, Gates enrolled in Seattle's Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school (Gates). This is where he first became interested in computers. He and his friends actually began neglecting their regular studies in order to spend more time exploring computers, which eventually got them banned from the computer room. Bill spent many hours reading and studying books and encyclopedias and his parents began to have concerns about his behavior. However, in 1968, they formed the Lakeside Programmers Group (2001). Gates began writing his first computer programs when he was thirteen. He and his friend Paul Allen wrote scheduling programs for their school. Little did he know, him and Paul would become great business partners.
Middle Life
The middle of Gates’ life is his prime and most accomplishing period of his lifetime. Being a top scholar, Bill enrolled in Harvard but dropped out at the age of 20 (Gates). Most would see this as a bad decision, but Gates had something else in mind. After dropping out, he met up with his former classmate Paul Allen and invented Microsoft Corp (2001). In 1977, Microsoft had already earned about 300,000 dollars. However, shortly after, they made a deal with the Tandy Corporation which hired Microsoft to create software for Radio Shack computers (Elmer-DeWitt 1995). In 1980, Microsoft truly took off when IBM asked Gates to develop an operating system for a prototype personal computer. Six years later Bill made Microsoft go public and after one year Bill became the world’s youngest billionaire, at the age of 32 (Bill, 2012, pg. 30).
End of Life
After Gates successful journey, he then put his focus on being an author, population issues, and education. In 1995, Gates co-authored The Road Ahead, a book telling his