Tech Empire: The Ruthless Rise of Young Bill Gates

By 1987 Bill Gates became the youngest billionaire in American history when Forbes estimated his net worth to be $1 Billion at the tender age of 31 Just 8 years later in 1995 at the age of 40 Bill Gates became the world's richest man, a title he would hold for 22 years, he had in 2 decades created the world's largest software company from a small office in the desert, but how did he achieve this feat? In 1977 Microsoft then headquartered in the desert of Albuquerque, New Mexico almost ran out of money, just a decade later it would be the largest software company in the world.

Our story begins with the Altair 8800 the world’s first microcomputer, the computer that began the computer revolution. Paul Allen, a close friend of Bill Gates had seen the Altair plastered on the front page of the Popular Electronics Magazine, he told Bill Gates that the computer revolution was happening and it was happening without them. Paul Allen and Bill Gates knew the power of computers since their first encounter in high school. They saw a world where they would one day be ubiquitous and this world was beginning to materialize while Bill Gates was still in College at Harvard studying Law. The pair got in contact with Mits the manufacturer of the Altair and offered to license them a version of the basic programming language that would run on the computer, Ed Roberts the founder of Mits said that if the boys could demonstrate a working basic programming language that runs on the Altair microcomputer that they’d have a deal. There was one big problem Gates and Allen didn’t have a version of Basic ready for the Altair so they spent the next couple of weeks writing the Basic, the interesting thing is they didn’t have the Altair 8800 so they had no way to test if their Basic was going to run until they day they had to demonstrate for Mits and Ed Roberts, luckily for the boys it ran, it became the first microcomputer programming language in history. The boys incorporated a company called Microsoft and negotiated a royalty deal with Mits that stipulated that Microsoft would get a cut from each microcomputer Mits sold.

By 1980 IBM realized that the microcomputer was becoming a seriously significant market that threatened their business, they knew that if they did not release a personal computer of their own soon the market would leave them behind, So they created a separate team that was to work outside IBM’s bureaucratic corporate structure. To prioritize speed IBM chose to outsource most of the computers hardware and software, this included the operating system that was supposed to run these machines, they initially approached Bill Gates for an operating system but he didn’t have one and directed them to someone who did Gary Kildall. Gary Kildall was the founder of Digital Research which was the company behind the CPM operating system which was one of the most popular operating systems of the time, but IBM was unable to make a deal with Kildall, they approached Gates again and Bill Gates was not one to pass up a big opportunity twice so he agreed to license IBM an operating system but remember Microsoft didn’t have an operating system so they went out and bought one called Q-DOS for just $50 000 which Microsoft tweaked and called MS-DOS.

When he was shown the Apple GUI he immediately knew that this is how every computer would look in the future he simply had to have the prototypes of the Apple computer so he could analyze them further, so he struck a deal with Apple to develop software for the Apple Macintosh. But while Bill Gates was developing software for the Macintosh he was also closely studying it for another use, he began a secret project within Microsoft to create its own Graphical User Interface, it would be called Windows and when it was released it had a striking resemblance to the Apple GUI. Apple decided to sue Microsoft for stealing their intellectual property but they lost the lawsuit because they too had gotten the idea from Xerox Parc.