After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Science that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates called MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others had developed a version of the programming language BASIC for the platform. This was untrue, as Gates and Allen had never used an Altair previously nor developed any code for it. Within a period of eight weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. Allen and Gates flew to MITS to unveil the new BASIC system. The demonstration was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to buy the rights to Allen and Gates' BASIC for the Altair platform. It was at this point that Gates left Harvard along with Allen to found Micro-Soft, which was later renamed the Microsoft Corporation.
In February 1976, Gates published his often-quoted "Open Letter to Hobbyists", that claimed that most users of his software had stolen it and that this would prevent the development of good software, and that no hobbyist could afford to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality software without payment. This letter was deeply unpopular with many programmers who were doing just that, but was to gain significant support from Gates' business partners and allies and became part of the movement which led to closed-source becoming the dominant model of software production.
When IBM decided to build the hardware for a desktop personal computer in 1980, it needed to find an operating system. Microsoft did not have any operating system at this point. The most popular microcomputer operating system at the time was CP/M developed by Digital Research in Monterey. The CP/M BIOS allowed software written for the Intel 8080/Zilog Z80 family of microprocessors to run on many different models of computer from many different manufacturers. This device-independence feature was essential for the formation of the consumer software industry, as without it software had to be re-written for each different model of computer. Bill Gates referred IBM to Gary Kildall, the founder of Digital Research, but when they did not reach immediate agreement with him they went back to Gates who offered to fill their need himself. He did it by buying a CP/M clone called QDOS ("Quick and Dirty Operating System") from Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products for $56,000, which Microsoft renamed PC-DOS.
Later, after Compaq licensed Phoenix Technologies' clone of the IBM BIOS, the market saw a flood of IBM PC clones. Microsoft was quick to use its position to dominate the home computer operating system market. Microsoft began licensing its OS for use on non-IBM PC clones, and called that version MS-DOS (for Microsoft Disk Operating System). By marketing MS-DOS aggressively to manufacturers of IBM-PC clones, Microsoft went from a small player to one of the major software vendors in the home computer industry. Microsoft continued to develop operating systems as well as software applications. In the early 1980's they created Microsoft Windows which was similar to Apple Computer's Macintosh OS graphical user interface (GUI), both based on the human interface work at Xerox PARC. The first versions of the Windows OS did not sell well as stand-alone applications but started to be shipped pre-installed on many systems. Because of this, by the late-1980s Microsoft Windows had begun to make serious headway into the IBM-compatible PC software market. The release of Windows 3.0 in 1990 was a tremendous success, selling around 10 million copies in the first two years and cementing Microsoft's dominance in operating systems.
Microsoft eventually went on to be the largest software company in the world, earning Gates enough money to make him the wealthiest person in the world (according to Forbes Magazine) for several years. Gates served as the CEO of the company until 2000 when Steve Ballmer took the position. Gates continues to serve as a chairman of the board at the company and also as a position he created for himself entitled "Chief Software Architect". Microsoft has thousands of patents, and Gates has nine patents to his name.
Since Microsoft's founding and as of 2006, Gates has had primary responsibility for Microsoft's product strategy. He has aggressively broadened the company's range of products, and wherever Microsoft has achieved a dominant position he has vigorously defended it. Many decisions that have led to antitrust litigation over Microsoft's business practices have had Gates's approval. In the 1998 United States v. Microsoft case, Gates gave deposition testimony that several journalists characterized as evasive. He argued over the definitions of words such as "compete", "concerned", "ask", and "we." BusinessWeek reported, "early rounds of his deposition show him offering obfuscatory answers and saying 'I don't recall' so many times that even the presiding judge had to chuckle. Worse, many of the technology chief's denials and pleas of ignorance were directly refuted by prosecutors with snippets of e-mail Gates both sent and received."
On April 1, 1976, Jobs, then 21, and Wozniak, 26, founded Apple Computer Co. to market a computer that Wozniak had designed for his own use. Initially their plan was to sell just printed circuit boards, but when a local computer store ordered a batch of complete, assembled computers, they went into the computer business. The first personal computer Jobs and Wozniak introduced was called the Apple I. It sold for $666.66, in reference to the phone number of Wozniak's Dial-a-Joke machine, which ended in -6666. In 1977, Jobs and Wozniak introduced the Apple II, which became a huge success in the home market and made Apple an important player in the nascent personal computer industry. In December 1980, Apple Computer became a publicly traded corporation, and with the successful IPO, Jobs's stature rose further. That same year, Apple Computer released the Apple III, but it met much less success.
As Apple continued to grow, the company began looking for corporate management talent to help manage its expansion. In 1983, Jobs lured John Sculley, an executive with Pepsi-Cola, to serve as Apple's CEO, challenging him, "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?" That same year, Apple also released the technologically advanced but commercially unsuccessful Lisa.
1984 saw the introduction of the Macintosh, the first commercially successful computer with a graphical user interface. The development of the Mac was started by Jef Raskin, and the team was inspired by technology that had been developed at Xerox PARC, but not yet commercialized. Apple had paid a fee for use of the PARC technology. The success of the Macintosh led Apple to abandon the Apple II in favor of the Mac product line, which continues to this day.
Steve Jobs’ Departure from Apple and creation of NeXT
While Jobs was a persuasive and charismatic evangelist for Apple, critics also claimed he was an erratic and tempestuous manager. In 1985, after an internal power struggle, Jobs was stripped of his duties by the board of directors and resigned from Apple. Jobs still remained chairman of Apple Computer at that time.
After leaving Apple, Jobs founded another computer company, NeXT Computer. Like Apple's Lisa computer, the NeXT workstation (one of NeXT Computer's first products) was technologically advanced, but it never was able to break into the mainstream because of its high cost. Among those who could afford it, it did, however, garner a strong following due to its technical strengths, chief among them being its object-oriented software development system.
Tim Berners-Lee developed the original World Wide Web system at CERN on a NeXT workstation. Jobs' insistence that average people should be able to write custom "mission-critical" applications formed the basis of Interface Builder, which Berners-Lee utilized to do just that — write a program entitled "WorldWideWeb 1.0".
The Return of Apple Computer.
Apple's reliance on ancient software and internal mismanagement, particularly its inability to release a major operating system upgrade, had brought it near bankruptcy in the mid 1990s. Jobs' progressive stance on Unix underpinnings was considered overly ambitious and somewhat backward in the 1980s, but his choice ultimately became an expandable, solid foundation for an operating system. Apple would later acquire this software and, under Jobs' leadership, experience a renaissance.
NeXT's technologies also helped the advancement of technologies such as object-oriented programming, Display PostScript, and magneto-optical devices. In 1997, Apple bought NeXT for $402 million, bringing Jobs back to the company he founded. In 1997 he became Apple's interim CEO after the directors lost confidence in and ousted then-CEO Gil Amelio. Upon returning to the leadership of Apple, Jobs used the title of "iCEO". In March of 1997 Jobs abruptly terminated a number of projects such as Newton, Cyberdog, and OpenDoc. In the coming months, many employees developed a fear of encountering Jobs while riding in the elevator, "afraid that they might not have a job when the doors opened. The reality was that Steve's summary executions were rare, but a handful of victims is enough to terrorize a whole company."
With the purchase of NeXT, much of the company's technology found its way into Apple products, notably NeXTSTEP, which evolved into Mac OS X. Under Jobs' guidance the company increased sales significantly with the introduction of the iMac. Since then, appealing designs and powerful branding have worked well for Apple.
In recent years, the company has branched out. With the introduction of the iPod portable music player, iTunes digital music software, the iTunes Music Store, the company is making forays into personal electronics and online music. While stimulating innovation, Jobs also reminds his employees that "real artists ship," by which he means that delivering working products on time is as important as innovation and killer design.
Jobs worked at Apple for several years with an annual salary of $1, and this earned him a listing in Guinness World Records as the "Lowest Paid Chief Executive Officer". At the 2000 keynote speech of Macworld Expo in San Francisco, the company dropped the "interim" from his title. His current salary at Apple officially remains $1 per year, although he has traditionally been the recipient of a number of lucrative "executive gifts" from the board, including a $90 million jet in 1999, and just under 30 million shares of restricted stock in 2000-2002. As such, Jobs is well compensated for his efforts at Apple despite the nominal one-dollar salary.
Jobs is both admired and criticized for his consummate skills of persuasion and salesmanship, which has been dubbed the "reality distortion field" and is particularly evident during his keynote speeches at Macworld Expos. This "RDF" shield is an encapsulating term, also referring to Apple's sometimes non-competitive market pricing, such as the overly expensive G4 cube, or making decisions outside the desire of market demands, such as the elimination of Macintosh clones. Not all of his decisions have met with widespread approval. Apple's marketing efforts, for example, in the 1980s, while excellent from a technical standpoint, were alienating to corporate buyers. Corporate buyers consequently turned to IBM, resulting in a precipitous drop in market share. Microsoft further diminished Apple's lead by later developing its own GUI, Microsoft Windows, which eventually eclipsed and dominated over Apple's share.
Google is a very famous search engine and IT company that is bringing out innovative as well as very useful tools on the Internet It is based in Mountain View, California. Eric Schmidt, formerly chief executive officer of Novell, was named Google's CEO when co-founder Larry Page stepped down. Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the co-founders of Google.
It was originally nicknamed, "BackRub," because the system checked backlinks to estimate a site's importance. The name "Google" is a play on the word "googol," which refers to the number represented by 1 followed by one hundred zeros. "Googling" is using the popular search engine Google.com to look up someone's name in an effort to find out more about them.
Linus Torvalds was a college student at the University of Helsinki. Starting with the basics of a Unix system, he wrote the kernel -- original code -- for a new system for his x86 PC that was later dubbed Linux (pronounced linn-ucks). Torvalds revealed the original source code for free -- making him a folk hero among programmers -- and users around the world began making additions and now continue to tweak it. Linux is considered the leader in the practice of allowing users to re-program their own operating systems.
In 1986, Steve Jobs bought Lucasfilm's computer graphics division from George Lucas for $10 million and named the new computer animation studio Pixar. Jobs's new company, which was based in Emeryville, California, contracted with Disney to produce a number of computer-animated feature films, which Disney would co-finance and distribute.
The first film produced by that partnership, Toy Story, brought fame and critical acclaim to the studio when it was released in 1995. Over the next ten years, under Pixar's creative chief John Lasseter, the company would produce the box-office hits A Bug's Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), Monsters, Inc. (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), and The Incredibles (2004). Finding Nemo and The Incredibles each received the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, an award only first introduced in 2001.
He is the primary inventor of the World Wide Web, the system of text links and multimedia capabilities that made the Internet accessible to mass audiences. Lee wrote the original Web software himself in 1990 and made it available on the Internet in 1991. He joined MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994 and remains a leading authority on Internet issues. His 1999 book Weaving the Web described the Web's birth and growth. In 2003, Queen Elizabeth II announced that Berners-Lee would be made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) for his work on the Web.
He is an American computer scientist who is commonly referred to as one of the "founding fathesr of the Internet" for his key technical and managerial role in the creation of the Internet and the TCP/IP protocols which it uses.
He is one of the most famous crackers to be jailed. He was arrested by the FBI on February 15, 1995. Mitnick was convicted of wire fraud and of breaking into the computer systems of Fujitsu, Motorola, Nokia, and Sun Microsystems. He served five years in prison (four years of it pre-trial), 8 months of that in solitary confinement, and was released on January 21 2000. During his supervised release, which ended on January 21, 2003, he was restricted from using any communications technology other than a landline telephone, although occasional exceptions were granted.
He is a widely recognized figure in the video game industry. A prolific programmer, Carmack co-founded id Software, a computer game development company, in 1991. which has brought out ground breaking games like Wolfenstein 3d, Doom and Quake.