Bill Gates – person who make a difference

by Ido R

Joined May 2016
Published Books 1

INTRODUCTION

Throughout history, there have been people who have influenced the way we live. Bill Gates is one of these people.

I chose to write this research project on Bill Gates for several reasons.

To begin with, he has changed the way we use computers. Furthermore, after his retirement he set up a foundation with his wife whose goal is to help the impoverished in developing countries.

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There are several things that I already know about Bill Gates. Firstly, I know that he married Melinda Gates. In addition, I know that he is co-founder of Microsoft corporation.

I expect to learn new and interesting things about Bill Gates. First and foremost, I expect to find out about his parents and family. Also, I want to learn what his foundation achieves. Finally, I would like to discover what invention bill gates took part in.

Bill Gates has left his mark on the world. I am looking forward to finding out more about him.

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BIOGRAPHY AND TIMELINE OF BILL GATES

Early Life:

Bill Gates was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington. At birth, he was called William H. Gates III (nicknamed “Trey”). He no longer uses the “III”.

His father, William Henry Gates, was a promising law student when he met his future wife, Mary Maxwell. She was an athletic, friendly student at the University of Washington.

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The Gates family was a warm and close family. All three children (Bill, Kristi the older sister and Libby youngest) were encouraged to be competitive and strive for excellence. As a young child, he liked board games, especially Risk and Monopoly. He also enjoyed non-team sports such as roller-skating, tennis, skiing and waterskiing.

Gates had a very close relationship with his mother, Mary, who after a brief career as a teacher devoted her time to helping raise the children, working on civic affairs and with charities. She would often take Gates with her when she volunteered in schools and at community organization.

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Bill Gates’s Education:

Gates was a voracious reader as a child, spending many hours poring over reference books such as the encyclopedia. Gates’s parents wanted to send him to public schools but were concerned about his level of maturity. According to his father, they “thought he was a little immature and that a little bit smaller class setting would be more supportive”. As a result, when Gates turned 13 his parents sent him to Lakeside School, a private school. There he was impressive and succeeded in all his subjects, excelling in math and science, but also did well in drama and English.

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When his school got computers, Gates was charmed with what computer could do and spent a lot of his free time working on the computer. When his school discovered Gates’s coding skills they let him create a computerized class schedule for the school. Gates slyly changed the code, so he was placed in classes with more girls.

Gates graduated from Lakeside School in 1973, He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the college SAT test. After graduation Gates registered to Harvard University in the fall of the same year. Gates originally thought of a career in law but Gates dropped out of college in 1975 to pursue his business, Microsoft, with his partner Allen.

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Meeting and Partnering with Paul Allen:

Gates met Allen in high school at Lakeside School, Allen was two years Gates’s senior. Regardless of their differences, they spent much of their free time together working on programs. In 1970, at the age of 15, Gates and Allen went into business together. They developed a computer program that monitored traffic patterns in Seattle. They got payed 20,000 dollars for their efforts.

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Gates and Allen wanted to start their own company, but Gates’ parents wanted him to finish school and go on to college, where they hoped he would become a lawyer. Both went to different collages, but they stayed in touch. After only two years in college Allen dropped out and moved to Boston, Massachusetts. Around this time, Allen showed Gates an edition of popular Electronics magazine featuring an article on the Altair 8800 mini-computer kit. Both young men were amazed with the possibilities of what this computer could create in the world of personal computing.

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The Altair was made by a small company called MITS. Gates and Allen contacted the company proclaiming that they were working on a BASIC (program language) program that would run the Altair computer. They didn’t have an Altair to work with, but they wanted to know if MITS was interested in someone developing such software.

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The president of the company, Ed Roberts, asked the boys for a demonstration. They worked the next two months writing the code at Harvard’s computer lab. Allen went there to test the code that had never been tested before. It worked perfectly. Allen was hired at MITS and soon Gates left Harvard to work with him. Together they founded Microsoft.

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Founding Microsoft:

In 1975, Gates and Allen formed Microsoft, a blend of ‘micro-computer’ and software.

The company’s first product was BASIC software that ran on the Altair computer.

MITS paid them 3000 dollars plus royalties for the software but only about 10 percent of the people using BASIC in the Altair computer had paid for it.

In 1977, MITS was sold to another computer company. Gates and Allen were on their own. Microsoft started writing software for other computer companies. At the beginning of 1979, Microsoft’s office was moved to Bellevue, Washington.

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In 1980, IBM was looking for software that would operate their upcoming personal computer (pc) and approached Microsoft. Gates quickly Impressed IBM, convincing them that he and his company could meet their needs. Following the development of software for IBM, between 1979 and 1981 Microsoft’s growth exploded. Staff increased from 25 to 128

and the revenue had roughly doubled each year, reaching 16 million dollars in 1981.But that was only the beginning from 1981 to 1990, annual revenues would grow to 1.2 billion dollars.

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By 1983, Microsoft was going global with offices in Great Britain and Japan. An estimated 30 percent of the world’s computers ran on its software. In the same year Allen had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, and he resigned from the company.

In spite of the big success Gates wanted to take his company in new directions. He was intent on developing an operating system and applications that would run in a graphical user interface. In 1985, Microsoft would release its Microsoft Office suite of integrated applications for the Macintosh, Windows 1.0 was launched.

In 1986, Gates took Microsoft public. The company’s stock initially sold for 21$ (today the stock price is 210 dollars). Making Gates a multimillionaire at the age of 31.

In 2000, Gates stepped down as CEO of Microsoft, and Steve Ballmer, who had been with Microsoft since 1980, took over.

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Family life:

In 1994 he got married to Melinda French, a Microsoft employee who had joined the company in 1987. The two met at a company picnic in 1988. A few months after the wedding Gates’s mother died of breast cancer. Because of that they took some time off in 1995 to travel and get a new perspective on life.

In 1996, their first daughter, Jennifer, was born. Their son, Rory, was born in 1999, and a second daughter, Phoebe, Arrived in 2002.

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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation:

In 1994, Bill and Melinda established the William H. Gates foundation, which was dedicated to supporting education, world health and investment in low-income communities around the world. In 2000, the couple combined several family foundations and made a 28$ billion contribution to form their Foundation.

Since stepping down from Microsoft, Gates devotes much of his time and energy to the work of the Foundation.

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In 2002, The foundation installed 47000 computers in 11,000 libraries throughout the US. The foundation received a boost in 2006 when Gates’s good friend Warren Buffet pledged more than 30$ billon. In 2013, Gates launched 5.5 billon dollars project to eliminate polio by 2018. Polio does still exist, although polio cases have decreased by over 99% since 1988, from an estimated more than 350 000 cases to 22 reported cases in 2017.

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In 2017, the foundation launched the first of what was to become its annual “Goalkeepers” report, an examination of progress made in several important areas related to public health, including child mortality, malnutrition and HIV.

Over the years Gates warned that the word was not ready for the next pandemic. This year Gates saw his ominous words come true with the outbreak of COVID-19. In March the Foundation teamed with the Wellcome Trust and Mastercard to pledge $125 million toward research on the virus. Gates revealed that his foundation was prepared to invest billions to build factories to develop vaccine.

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what inspired Bill Gates to make his mark on the world?

Gates had a very close relationship with his mother, Mary, who devoted her time to working on civic affairs and charities. She would often take Gates along when she volunteered. After his mother’s death Gates had taken an interest in becoming a civic leader in the footsteps of his mother, studying the philanthropic work of American industrial titan Andrew Carnegie. He realized that he had an obligation to give more of his wealth to charity.

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Beginning in the late 1800s, Carnegie helped spark the creation of the U.S. library system. One hundred years later, Gates digitally empowered it. Both made significant investments in public education. Carnegie worked to foster peace worldwide, and Gates has tackled global health.

In 1889 Carnegie published the “Gospel of Wealth”, an essay arguing that it is the moral obligation of the wealthy to give back most of their money and to do so before their deaths. The Gateses have carried out that legacy.

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Bill Gates – person who make a difference by Ido R - Ourboox.com

MY INTERVIEW WITH LIOR SHASHO

I chose to interview Lior Shasho. He is a manager of DevOps. He works at Guardicore.

There are several reasons why I chose to interview this person

First of all, Lior is my uncle and he introduced me to programing. Without him I would never know about programing can do.

Moreover, when I thought who I could interview about the effect that Bill Gates’ operating system has on the world, he was the first one who pop up in my head because he works with operating system.

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Q: In which field does your company work?

A: Cyber security and micro segmentation.

Q: How does the operating system affect the services your company gives?

A: Guardicore protects servers and it means we have an agent for every kind of operating systems. If a customer has a legacy operating system like Solaris we need to create a new agent that will support this type of operation system.

Q: Does your company use windows or other operating systems? And what is the use of each one?

A: All our laptops are installed with windows however all the server side is based on Linux (Ubuntu)

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Q: What is the difference between each operating system / Is there another difference between the operating systems?

A: We have thousands of servers since we are using Ubuntu we don’t need to pay for license. If we use windows for all the servers the cost will be killer for us
Moreover, most of the open source applications that we are using were built for Linux and not for windows. In general, most of the applications in the internet are designed to run on Linux.

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Q: Which operating system do you prefer?

A: For daily use I prefer windows because it is more comfortable to work with it, however if I need to develop something, I’ll use Linux

Q: Does another product of Microsoft affect your work and how does it affect you?

A: We are using Office 365 in order to write docs and presentation and seems like Microsoft has the best suite for this kind of tasks.

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Q: Do you want to work at Microsoft? Why?

A: No, Microsoft is a large enterprise and I prefer to work in a place which is more like a family, a place that I know everyone and I have big impact on the road map of the company.

Q: How does Microsoft contribute to your field?

A: Microsoft purchased GitHub a few years ago (GitHub is the most popular app to manage your code) and Microsoft declared that they would provide GitHub for open source projects for free which is great gesture.

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Q: If Bill Gates had not created the operating system (windows) and office, how do you think the world would look?

A: I guess that the world would be the same because someone else would probably take this position. there are many other operating systems and it is just question of who is the most popular one (if it’s not Microsoft it will be another company).

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Q: Bill Gates donates a fortune to help humanity. Does this fact make you prefer to buy Microsoft rather than other companies?

A: Not really … bottom line it’s a business, Bill Gates made a fortune from Microsoft and he can now use this fortune and donate some of that. Unfortunately, when you build a product or an application you have to save money whenever you can and if it means to use open source operating since instead of paying for license that what I’ll do.

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REFLECTION

I found the preparation of this project worthwhile for several reasons.

First of all, I learned a lot about Bill Gates while doing the project. Secondly, I identify with his desire to change the way we use computer. moreover, it gives me motivation and inspiration to do something great in my life as he has done with his.

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I learned many things while working on the project.

I learned how Microsoft was founded by two drop-out teenagers and developed into a company which is worth billions of dollars. I learn about the challenges that Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation takes on themselves such as: helping extreme poverty and poor health in developing countries and more global projects.

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I developed a number of skills during my work on this project.

I learned to take the key sentence from articles. I also developed the ability to finish a task before the deadline. Before this project, I finished tasks day or two before the deadline but in this project, I learned that it is important to manage the time correctly, so you have extra time to check for errors and to make it better so you can get the maximum score.

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I enjoyed working alone for number of reasons:

I could do the tasks whenever I want and I didn’t have to synchronize with someone else. Another advantage is that I decided on my own without arguing about it. The downside is that if I had a partner it would take less time to do the project and make it easier.

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On the one hand, there were things I enjoyed while working on the project.

Reading about Bill Gates’s life was interesting and I enjoyed it a lot because I learned about his history in this way, I understood better his decision-making. In addition, it was inspiring to read how a billionaire decided to donate his money to helping people in developing countries. Besides that I enjoyed doing the interview and learn more about the impact of Microsoft on business.

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On the other hand, there were things I enjoyed less while working on the project.

I had a lot of reading to do. Although it is something I do regularly. in this project i needed to read it slowly to understand the material. It was really time consuming but as I read more I could read faster and understand the article better than before.

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In conclusion I am grateful that I had the opportunity to prepare this project.

It was really interesting and challenging project that improve my skills in general and English in particular. Thanks to this project I had to overcome my fear of presenting. I believe that if I had to deal with a project like this again, now I can do it more easily.

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