And as his vision materialized, by 39 he became the richest man in the world.EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the seventh article in our ‘Gain-of-Function Hall of Shame’ series profiling key players in gain-of-function research. When Windows launched, Bill visualized a world where every home had a computer, and that computer was running Windows. Bill listened calmly and replied that Jobs stole the idea just as he did himself. In front of ten Apple employees Jobs accused Gates for robbing Apple. He lashed out at Bill calling him down to Cupertino. When Jobs heard about Windows, he went ballistic. And now he wanted to create a visual operating system of his own. Bill remembered where he saw this idea of visual interfaces – it was Xerox. Ideas, after all, are worthless until executed. Bill started to be a perfectionist.īut Bill was not going to spend his life working on Jobs’ brilliant ideas. He got better and better until he got really good. Jobs thought Bill’s team’s product was tasteless, but Bill kept at it. He wanted Bill to write new software that was visual. Bill saw the opportunity to make people pay for software. “Who would pay for software?” they reasoned. And without copyright – they never asked for it. But he said, “Yes.” Real quick, he found an operating system from another person in Seattle and bought it. Did he somehow know it would be worth a lot in the future? So he started to be a copyright guru.įive years later IBM knocked on Bill’s door to see if he had written an operating system they could buy. The computer company bought it for $3,000. When they were done, Bill flew to New Mexico to show this new language he had written called BASIC. Bill coded all day long, slept at the computer, woke up and picked up programming exactly where he left off. Bill wrote 50% of the code, using Harvard’s computers. Next Bill sat down with his friend Paul from high school, and the two wrote that programming language that he talked about on the phone. And, yes, the computer company was very interested in buying. He hadn’t even started to write the language. (He hadn’t.) He asked if they might buy it. He called them to say that he wrote a programming language for it. Only to find himself unsure about where to start – as a pre-law major or as something else? Reading Popular Mechanics one day in college he read an ad about a new computer. Next, Bill scored 1590 out of 1600 on SAT. Then the school realized he had a rare skill so they asked him to use the computer and help them find bugs. When money ran out, he hacked into the computer to use it for free. The school he went to bought one machine and a teletype.
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