Famous Thinkers Paper

Famous Thinkers Paper

Ken Drake

PHL/458

January 13, 2014

Kay Rubin

Famous Thinkers

When one has to choose only two of the great thinkers of our time, the task becomes daunting and exhausting. Many of the great thinkers have specialized in the thought processes and affected that niche of operations while other have affected the world with their ideas and inventions. To that end I have chosen Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and William Henry Gates, or Bill Gates as we know him. One changed our thinking of civil right while the other changed the way we communicate. To begin this paper I will introduce Bill Gates.

William Henry Gates was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington. As a young man Bill loved to play board games like Monopoly and Risk. He loved to read and spent a large amount of his free time with reference books and encyclopedias. This led his parents to believe that he might be socially stunted, so they enrolled him at Seattle’s Lakeside School. This preparatory school was just the place for this active mind to grow.

The cave man age of computers had dawned, and Bill was hooked. At the early age of 13 Bill became interesting in computer programming but there was a limited amount of information out there to work with. This fact did not stop him from learning everything he could on the matter and so created simple programs to track school activities and even some simple games. This love of computers led him to Paul Allen, two year older than Bill, but just as engrossed in programming. Together they took over the computer lab at school, got banished from the lab for a while for exploiting a glitch in the school computer program so they could have more time there but earned their way back in when they offered to debug the system.

Bill and Paul went on to form “Traf-o-Data” and produce a program that would monitor traffic patterns on the Seattle streets for which they got $20,000. It was at this point...