Bill Gates: An Important Visionary for Better or Worse by Blake NoonanHaving an imagination is a virtue. Imagining a whole new way to communicate and interact with others through a machine is incredible in itself. Bill Gates is not only the richest man in the world, but some also consider him the most resourceful. Others see him as a monopolizing, money-hungry nerd. William Gates III was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1955. At the age of thirteen, he wrote his first software, which allowed him and his friends to play tic-tac-toe. While Gates was studying at Harvard, his best friend Paul Allen showed him the latest electronic hardware system in Popular Electronics magazine. A man named Ed Roberts had invented the first personal computer prototype in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was the Altair 8800. Gates and Allen had been waiting for this their whole lives and wanted to be a part of it. Together, they created a computer language that they hoped Altaïr could understand. Allen traveled to Albuquerque to see if their hard work had paid off. Gates worried that companies wouldn't take them seriously and question their credibility. On the other hand, MITS, the company that produced the Altair, was amazed and offered them their own Altair 8800. At the age of nineteen, Gates left Harvard and co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen . Microsoft started in a hotel room in Albuquerque with Gates and Allen as co-founders. They hired a few others, who helped them perfect their binary system and commercialize it. After a year or two of working with this language, they weren't making much profit. They felt Microsoft needed a change. Gates and Allen moved to Seattle in 1980 and teamed up with Harvard roommate Steve Ballmer. In August 1980, the three men went to IBM's headquarters in Miami, Florida, to pitch them a disk-based operating system. They convinced IBM that they needed “DOS” to compete with Apple. What IBM didn't know is that it offers multiple technological advantages over a standalone browser such as Netscape's Navigator. Microsoft says PC makers work with Windows because it can be modified and any additional software can easily be installed. Both arguments put forward are convincing. The deal between the government and Microsoft is unlike any other. The government believes that Microsoft took extreme measures to find him guilty and is currently trying to find out how Microsoft should be punished. “The political right of the individual to his own life is an essential principle of liberty. And this rests on the moral rightness of acting to provide for one's own needs, which involves generating the material wealth that life requires” (Bernstein, K3970). Bill Gates may seem like a horrible man to many of his competitors, but his contribution to the world of computers has been enormous. His greatest achievement when it comes to Microsoft is not only creating good software, but also the fact that he knew that software was the way to make the most money. This is the reason why more people use the Microsoft operating system than any other..