Sergey K and Le Shorte
or
take your pick,
Yes, Gates was quite young when he started MS. His birth year was 1955. That makes him 20 when he started MS and 23 when that pic was taken. But, he always had a boyish face. He truly looked like a surfer and he did like to surf.
From my notes with the pic.
He was 13 when he wrote his first program (IN BASIC) for a GE Computer. At 16 he helped write an accounting program with three of his classmates from Lakeside Preparatory School. He graduated in 1973 and had an almost perfect SAT score. Before starting the company he wrote a BASIC interpreter for the MITS. The very first microcomputer. I have written that this was 1975. I also have written that he started MS with Paul Allen when he dropped out of Harvard. It started out as Micro-soft and later (within a year) they changed it to Microsoft. In the early years the staff had broad responsibilities but he seemed to oversee all the business details. I had talked to him a lot during the those years.
Some people seem to think that IBM approached Gates about writing their OS for their microcomputer. Instead it was Gates who approached IBM. Of course, they are going to probably want it to seem the other way around. IBM doesn't work that way. They keep everything in-house and actually they have always been a proprietary company. It was Gates who wanted them to get away from that with the microcomputer. He saw that if it were open-architecture then he could sell more OS software.
My personal input to him was to keep hounding IBM until they succumb.
Regarding IBM. What helped sell Gates to IBM (my own personal thoughts) was the fact that Gates made
all of the software for Tandy Corporation from 1977 onward. Most accounts of MS do not include this and it was Tandy who really got MS on it's feet. Of course the IBM coup really boosted his company.
Anyway, if I would have bought into the company when he asked me to, I, too would be a mufti-millionaire. But alas, the wife didn't want to do it. It was penny stock then. I have no problems with that as I'm well off and have no complaints. Although, I liked and appreciated Bill Gates during those early years, I'm not sure about today.
It's just interesting to see the look then. He still has that boyish look but with wrinkles. :LOL:
Also, he still maintains a start-up culture within the company.
Addendum:
It was Tandy that was proprietary with their computers and MS software only worked on the Tandy machines. TRS-80 I, II and II as well as the color computer. I would assume this is what got Gates thinking about open-architecture and it would be ideal to be that because it would be more salable as a personal computer. Of course, Tandy and Apple actually made the first "personal" computer. Tandy concentrating on the small business end.
I wanted to see if I could find a recent pic of Gates. I did find a 2012 pic.
THEORY - you know everything but nothing works. PRACTICE - when everything works but don't know why. For me, theory and practice are combined: nothing works and I don't know why.
