Very unlikely. He may be on the Asperger's end of the Autism-Asperger's axis.

Yes, he does.

Bill Gates

"If you can't make it good, make it look good." -- Bill Gates

I selected Bill Gates because he is a very important person today, and I didn't know much about him other than he was the richest man in the world. I wanted to know how or why he became so successful. Also, I wanted to know why he is such a controversial person.

Facts in Brief

Birth: October 28th, 1955 in Seattle Washington

Parents: William H. and Mary Gates

Education: Lakeside, a private high school, and a major of Prelaw at Harvard

Childhood

Bill was the second of three children. His father was a lawyer. His mother was very active in business, education, public service, and was on the board of United Way. Growing up, school was very easy for him and he learned very quickly. Most people who knew him say that it was impossible to win an argument against him because he knew so much. Socially, he was an outcast; his interests were very different from others.

School

By 1970, he was sent to a private school in Seattle called Lakeside because he was gifted. There he discovered computers and fell in love with them. His school bought computer time for a year, but he used it up in a week. He was addicted.

He became good friends with Paul Allen, another computer whiz. Pretty soon, they became very good programmers. To learn more about computers, they would sometimes climb into trash bins of local computer companies to find programmers' old notes.

Finally, he got a job working out computer bugs. Soon, Paul and he also organized a company called the Traf-o-data; it recorded traffic data for his town and it was very profitable. He also developed some programs for his school. One kept track of pay roll, and the other kept track of class scheduling; it also put him in classes with pretty girls.

In high school, he also became an eagle scout and was rewarded with a trip to Washington D.C. to become a page in the U.S. Senate. By 1973, though, he was offered a job to write a program to control electric power supply for the entire Pacific Northwest. It was a long ways away, and he would miss half of his senior year, but he took it.

In 1974, he attended Harvard. His major was Prelaw. College was also very easy for him, so he tried to see how few classes he could attend and maintain A's. He spent a lot of free time playing poker or other leisure activities and programming as well.

Microsoft

While at Harvard he created a programming code for Altair called BASIC. He dropped out of college and started Microsoft. It developed programs for several companies (including Apple and Radio Shack).

In the '80's, their big break came. They were asked to make an operating system for IBM. So, Bill bought an existing one from a Seattle company. He improved it and licensed it to IBM. It was called MS-DOS.

By 1985, Microsoft went public. That means that they split the company into shares for sale on the stock market. Before then the programmers working for Microsoft weren't paid very well and worked long hours. After it went public, everyone got rich. Bill is a very hard person to work for. He is often rude, sarcastic, and impatient when people don't catch on quickly. He has very few employees so he can keep in touch with all of them and so everyone is important.

In the eighties came spreadsheets, word processing systems; Windows came out in '85 and was a huge success because it allowed multitasking, had more graphics, and was more user-friendly. In 1983, Paul Allen got cancer and left Microsoft. Bill hired Jon Shirley to handle all of the business so that he could take care of all of the programming.

In the '90's, came several new updated versions of windows, new features included more CD technology, and computer networking. He created MSN (the second largest Internet service provider) and Internet Explorer and put them on all windows for free.

Monopoly

A lot of people say that Bill Gates is wrong in his ways of getting rich with a monopoly. He sells large quantities of products cheaply so that everyone is "hooked" and then raises the prices. If a competitor comes along he just lowers them until they are gone. He has always been smarter than his competition. When Microsoft was created, his dream was "to have a computer on every desk and home, all running windows and Microsoft software." He is very close to reaching that goal. It was ruled that Microsoft was a monopoly and was supposed to divide into two companies. Nothing ever happened, though, and no restrictions were set. Really, he is not doing anything illegal, but his way of business is unethical.

In 1994, Bill Gates married an employee, Melinda French. They currently have two children. He also founded Corbis, which has the largest variety of graphics. Also, his wife and he created a foundation to support Global Health and learning.

Impact on the 20th Century

I feel that Bill Gates had a huge impact on life in the twentieth century. Who knows where the computer industry would be right now if Microsoft hadn't been formed. He made many routine jobs computerized, such as accounting, research, data management, and many more. This would have still taken place, but who knows how long.

Not only his programming skills and hard work, but also his business aggressiveness made him one of the leaders in developing computer technology. At the beginning of his career, he sped up development of computers greatly. But now, is he helping society to grow ... or is he holding us back? For example, he would force people to go his way with developing technology, or else he would force them out of business. Some of them did have good ideas though, that might have been better. So did that slow progress or not? We don't know.