Just finished issuing a TV series which tells how the birth of personal computers occurred and their tremendous adoption by households. The fiction series, which is called Halt and Catch Fire and of which our colleagues of Vaya Tele have told us many novelties. It is set in 1984 and presents four very well defined profiles, very strong and which are the ones that contributed to revolutionize computer science of the time. The first is the commercial, the one that always has to exist to make the difficult easy and to excite customers and investors. The second is the hardware engineer, it is essential that a computer be built with strong wicks and that resist the use that will be given, the third is the software engineer, in this case a young programmer who pulls lines of code in an inspired way to make all that machinery show its full potential and take the user experience to the limit. And the fourth profile is that of the woman of the hardware engineer, a female character that is full of attractions and that fulfills the mission of being a mother, woman and successful worker.
In a unauthorized biography of Bill Gates I could read that at the beginning of Microsoft there were two profiles that stood out above all and that are shown in the series. One is that of commercial dreamer and visionary that is able to anticipate the future and get the investment to achieve it, which I think is Bill Gates, and that of software developer that taking advantage of the architecture of the time allowed to build an operating system and applications that worked on the machines that were built at the time and whose development led IBM, this is Paul Allen. Although what we talk about most in Peques and Más is what happens to the children and that is why we have to present some features of the characteristics of Bill Gates when he was little.
It seems that Bill Gates was a advanced child to the rest of the classmates, they would have been diagnosed with ADHD now and even medicated! that took advantage of the gaps in time that allowed him to learn quickly and efficiently, to study more, to prepare with emphasis, to always anticipate and to differentiate himself by taking advantage of his skills and abilities. Was especially good in math What prepared him to respond to technological challenges in dealing with abstract concepts is fundamental.
Bill Gates was born in 1955 and when the human being arrived at the moon in 1969 he was 14 years old. By then I was already working programming a computer to which they connected from the school, detecting flaws in the programming and sharing their concerns with Paul Allen that was two years! Older than him. Although now let's talk about the digital natives the truth is that Bill Gates already lived in first person, and with the limitations of the time, the possibilities offered by computer science. And they even learned programming at school! and their teachers did not know very well where they could go those children who used machines to learn very quickly. At school they came to solve problems of traffic management in the cities using traffic lights connected to computers, they improved the system of school management in which they studied, they helped identify programming errors on the machine they used to make applications and even worked for the computer area of a power plant.
One of his successes, and probably with the one he learned most from the world of business and from the difficult relationships that exist in this market, was to create software that allowed to take advantage of the computer Altair 8800, a microcomputer that could be built at home, that did not have many applications available for him and that ran with a Intel 8080 chip. It was a kind of Basic code that allowed to program the machine and to facilitate to the buyers to realize applications like games or several utilities. Although the qualitative leap was made by formalizing a relationship with IBM to create the MSDOS, the operating system that allowed the user to interact with the machine. And above all he discovered that you had to build applications that allowed you to get more out of computers and the operating system and thus Word and especially Excel, were the triggers of the revolution that he definitely put the computers in homes and in the company.
From that moment it is when the series that I was talking about at the beginning starts and that is the time in which I became fond of, like many other children and young people of the time, computers and the enormous possibilities they offered and that continue to offer .
The unfortunate thing, and that I think is not resolved in Spain yet, is how from a training in an academic environment it costs so much to adapt to the business world and of course they are counted the successes of the entrepreneurs that in Spain They know how to take advantage of the possibilities offered by this type of industry. However, in the United States, ambitious and talented young people were and continue to be able to build businesses from nowhere as they changed and revolutionized the lives of citizens anywhere in the world. They have not stopped doing so and remain a worldwide reference with companies whose products or services we use daily.
Bill Gates' father was a lawyer and his mother dedicated himself to raising his children in a family environment in which children always participated in discussions and decisions. In addition, Bill was always encouraged to develop his projects and enrolled in the Lakeside school, a school for boys with British methods in which it was educated with exclusive values and methods although it was not alien to the revolutions of the time and the relaxation of the norms was also applied in education. It was in this school where he identified the possibilities of computer science and knew how to take advantage of what he learned at this stage and also of the contacts he made especially with Paul Allen and a few years later, already at Harvard University, with Steve Ballmer. If at school it was one of the best, the truth is that at the University it is very complicated to stand out, so I imagine that Bill Gates took advantage of his opportunities and took advantage of his skills and contacts to start building his bright future.
For those who want to know more about Bill Gates there is a film in which he is portrayed, although I do not think it is a very real version, and it is called Pirates of Silicon Valley in which you can see the confrontation between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs when he had already set up Microsoft. In any case, I think Bill Gates’s greatest success was realizing the operating system allows you to do many things and that also had to be replicated in as many machines as possible. And what I think, and it is a personal opinion, that Bill Gates did not anticipate is that the Internet made operating systems lose prominence before a world of applications and utilities that allow us to access an offer of extraordinary leisure, entertainment and learning.
Nowadays Bill Gates with his wife Melinda direct the Foundation that bears his name and from which they carry out extraordinary projects to make our lives easier.
Note: the image that illustrates the article is tremendously famous and in it you can see Bill Gates bottom left. Very young and very bold sharing knowledge, illusions and concerns with other original Microsoft workers.
