Biography of Bill Gates

Business Biography of Bill Gates

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Business Biography of Bill Gates [Your Name]

Business Biography of Bill Gates The Beginnings of Personal Computing

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The origin of various simple aids to computation is lost in history. Examples include the Oriental abacus, various systems of counting marks and stones, and some fascinating geared artifacts from the Aegean that may have served a similar purpose (Menninger 2011: 43-47; 54-55). The creation of tables for navigational use spawned the first efforts to build a “real” computer, as doing the calculations needed to generate the tables was prone to error, and small errors could result in ships being lost. Between 1847 and 1849, English inventor Charles Babbage built the pieces of a machine called the difference engine to accomplish this task. It was never completed, largely due to frustrations with the lack of sufficient technology at the time to produce the high precision parts needed to make it function accurately. The machine has been reconstructed using modern machining technology to produce the components specified by Babbage, and it has been determined that Babbage’s difference engine could have been the first practical computer (Collier and MacLachlan 1999:346-353). The next great leap in the development of computers was due to the desire to break German codes during the Second World War. Previous codebreaking (cryptography) work had been done manually. Developments in codemaking (cryptology), however, required something more powerful. This “something” was the first electronic computers. Even though the development of the vacuum tube made it possible to build an accurate computer (contrast this with Babbage’s mechanical computer), the resulting machines were very large (they

Business Biography of Bill Gates 3 required complexes of buildings to house them, occasionally unreliable (the vacuum tubes burned out rapidly), and there was no easy way to program them, due to the lack of standard...