Bill Gates Book Summary

Book Summary

By Sumizeit Team

15 min

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Brief Summary

Learn about the life of Bill Gates and success story.

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Biography & Memoir

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There is no success story more iconic than the story of Bill Gates. His rise to fame not only changed his life, it changed the world -- as the founder of Microsoft, he was a pivotal player in the development of modern technology, internet culture, and the personal computer.

From Bill Gates, we learn the power of embracing your passion and constantly improving upon your work. We also learn the power of giving back, and the impact that a single, generous person can have on the lives of millions of people.

An Early Partnership

Bill Gates was born in Seattle, Washington in 1955. He came from a prominent local family - his father was a lawyer, and his mother served on the board of a large financial holdings company. From a young age, Bill was bullied for being small and unathletic. He recalls his father pushing him toward a career in law, and the competitive nature of his family life.

Bill enrolled in Lakeside Prep School at age thirteen, where he found his first and longest love: computers. After a Mothers Club bought the school time on a General Electric computer. Bill became fascinated with programming. The school recognized his talents and excused him from math class each day so he could spend time teaching himself how to program the GE computer in BASIC.

Another early love of Bill Gates was his best friend and long-time business partner, Paul Allen. Allen shared Gates’ love for computers, and the pair soon began work debugging a PDP-10 system. In order to pay for more time on the computer, Paul, Gates, and two friends programmed a payroll system for Information Sciences that they exchanged for royalties. Their prowess didn’t go unnoticed, and before long the pair were asked to develop a program to schedule student courses at Lakeside.

Gates was a bright kid, but he didn’t have a solid idea of his trajectory. He graduated from Lakeside as a National Merit Scholar with a near-perfect SAT score and decided to attend Harvard. He spent his one year in Boston on the university computers before Paul Allen asked him to join him at Honeywell, an information technology company. While working at Honeywell, the MITS Altair 8800 was released. Allen and Gates saw a business opportunity in software. They had no idea their work would change the world.

The Formative Years of Microsoft

After the launch of the MITS Altair 8800 microcomputer, Allen and Gates met with MITS to talk about developing a BASIC interpreter for their machine. MITS had no idea at the time that Gates and Allen hadn’t actually developed anything. When MITS came back with enthusiastic interest and scheduled a meeting to show the new product in a few weeks, Allen and Gates scrambled the develop a program.

MITS loved their product and agreed to distribute it with all of their computers. They hired Allen, and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to join him. They started a company called Micro-Soft, dropped the hyphen in 1976, and Microsoft was...