In the recent Wired magazine (yes, the paper one), there was an interesting time line of Bill Gates. It was rather an odd format, but I found the two page spread an enjoyable read. Some things of note in his early childhood, tips perhaps for us wanting to be successful.
- 1968 Gates and Allen learn basic and blow entire school budget of computing time in a few weeks.
- 1968 Employed to report PDP-10 software bugs.
- 1971 Writes class scheduling program that places him in classes with the “right” girls.
- 1973 Photographic memory, lucky him.
- 1975 Writes Basic for MTIS.
- 1976 Registers the trade name Microsoft.
- 1980 Buys QDOS for $50k, later renaming and reselling as DOS.
- 1984 Microsoft is one of the first software developers on Macintosh.
- 1986 Company goes public.
- 1996 Daily income is $30million, that’s per day.
- 1998 The famous pie incident.
So it seems, finding bugs, using technology to meet the right women, buying and reselling somebody else’s work worked out, but will it work now.
I read elsewhere that the companies of today, such as Amazon, eBay, Google, FaceBook etc didn’t even exist 15 years ago.
There is still the opportunity for people out there, like you and I to be billionaires. Like one of my fridge magnets states. “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” Time to go create the next great thing we all must have.
