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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alan Smithee who wrote (6513)	3/25/2006 5:41:00 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 71588

Gates was born a multi-millionaire. His great-grandfather started Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His grandfather left him a million dollars in a trust fund, which continued to appreciate. His father was a corporate lawyer. His mother served was a board member of First Interstate Bank and Pacific Northwest Bell. She was also on the national board of United Way, along with John Opel, the chief executive officer of IBM who approved the inclusion of MS/DOS with the original IBM PC. >> "In early 1975, while an undergraduate at Harvard University, [Bill Gates] and former Lakeside classmate Paul Allen developed BASIC for the first microcomputer, the MITS Altair." -- microsoft.com, January 11, 1998 According to Hard Drive, however, Bill Gates and Paul Allen didn't have enough time to get their BASIC interpreter working for the MITS Altair 8080. Paul Allen did the hard work of making an 8080 emulator for Harvard's PDP-10 mainframe computer. Gates and Allen were then able to enlist fellow Harvard student Monte Davidoff to implement the floating point arithmetic portions of the language. A search for "Davidoff" on www.microsoft.com came up with zero hits (January 11, 1998). After the demo, someone still had to go down to Albuquerque, New Mexico to (a) convince MITS to buy the code, and then (b) make the prototype into a usable system. Gates stayed at Harvard to play poker with his rich buddies while Paul Allen spent months in a motel room in Albuquerque. Microsoft came into existence because Allen successfully managed both the business and technology, earning him... a minority stake in the company.