Bill Gates Accomplishments

No matter how hard it may seem for most people, if you have a crazy dream, but you channel all your energy towards reaching it, your chances of reaching it will increase exponentially. No matter how much some people would disagree, I am sure Bill Gates is a living proof of the statement above. He's also a proof of the fact that having all the possible studies one, two or more universities can provide won't ever compensate for inspiration, passion, and sustained work. Now, let's get to the historic event that happened today - Bill Gates stepped down from most of his Microsoft-related duties, but remained the chairman of the company's board of directors.

Obviously, we can't just say "Bill Gates retired" without taking a look back and try to point out the highs and lows of his career as Microsoft's CEO, starting with those early "garage days" until today. This is a pretty long period - 33 years, and a good lesson for most people dreaming to have a net worth of a few million over night. Big things take time, remember that! Now, let's roll back to 1973...

...when Bill Gates graduated from Lakeside School, and scored 1590 out of 1600 on his SATs. In the fall of the same year, he enrolled at Harvard College, where he met Microsoft's future CEO - Steve Ballmer. Anyway, Microsoft wasn't even founded yet back then, but Gates met a lot of interesting people at Harvard, including Christos Papadimitriou, a computer scientist who worked with him on a paper about algorithms.

In 1975, Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work for Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems on a BASIC interpreter, and once Intel released the Intel 8080 CPU, he saw this as an opportunity to put his BASIC skills to work, starting a computer software company with Paul Allen.

As a side note, you should know this wasn't Gates' first business venture, because he formed Traf-O-Data with Allen a few years before, when he was 17, earning $20,000 in the first year, but that business went slowly down went his clients found out... his age!


On the 26th of November 1976, the trade name "Microsoft" was registered with the USPTO, after starting up as "Micro-soft" in Albuquerque. In that period, Gates wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter, after finding out that a pre-market copy of the BASIC interpreter he worked on leaked into the community. Gates pointed out in the letter that software developers should be able to demand payment, and in late 1976, Microsoft became independent of MITS.

On the 1st of January, 1979, the company moved to Bellevue, Washington. In those early days, Gates continued to write code, while taking care of the company as a whole, and it is worth being mentioned that, during the first 5 years in Microsoft's history, he personally reviewed every single line of code that made it to clients, often rewriting various parts by himself.

In 1980, IBM approached Microsoft to make the BASIC interpreter for the upcoming IBM PC, in a move that laid the foundation of the IT world as we know it. Pretty soon, MS-DOS was born, and Gates insisted to keep the copyright of what was a heavily modified 86-DOS, a operating system similar to CP/M, the most popular one before MS-DOS turned Microsoft into a major player of the IT industry.

The first retail version of Microsoft Windows arrived on the 20th of November, 1985, and Bill Gates' dream started to have a clear shape. Windows 95, Windows NT, the ill-fated Windows Millenium...all these are history already, and I think best thing to do now is to get back to Bill Gates...

Gates has three children, being married with Melinda since 1994, and a net worth of $58 billion, and still rising.

I think one of the greatest of Bill Gates' accomplishments is the fact that Windows doesn't work perfectly. I know it sounds strange, but think about all those jobs created by this simple fact! It doesn't work? Call a tech support center!

Today, Bill Gates delivered a short speech to Microsoft employees, saying "There won't be a day in my life when I won't be thinking about Microsoft, the great things that we're doing and wanting to help," with tears in his eyes.

That's it - no matter how you put it, an era is ending, and another one has already started. Should Gates return as a CEO, one day? Will Steve Ballmer be the CEO Microsoft needs in these troubled days? There are soo many questions, and lots of answers, but I know one thing - only time will tell, but until then, feel free to drop your comments below, I am sure you have plenty of things to say about this!