- Bill Gates I took a passion for politics while working as a page in the congress.
- While computers were still a “big stranger” in 1972, politics was a potential safeguard plan for the doors.
- In his memoirs, “Source code: my beginnings”, wrote Gates on his life before starting Microsoft.
In 1972, Bill Gates, 17, was not sure that computers would take off as he hoped, so he turned to a safeguard plan: politics.
Gates, who would go to Cofound Microsoft, worked as a page of the Congress for the House of deputies In Olympia, Washington and Washington, DC, as a high school student.
In his memoirs, “Source Code: My Beginnings”, Gates wrote that he has developed an interest in software at a young age and has spent time programming in the basement of the University of Washington. Although he found a passion for budding industry, computers were still “a great unknown” at the time, Gates said.
He spent a month working on Capitol Hill every day. At the time, Gates said he considered a career in computers as a “possible path”, but he was taken by the drama of work in politics.
Its passage in Washington, DC, Coincided with the Democratic presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton, abandoning the 1972 race – Gates said that he had later sold Eagleton’s campaign pins as collectors’ articles. Working as a page during this period “was the closest thing to a political thriller that I have ever seen,” said Gates.
After a month on the hill, Gates said that he had started to seriously consider a career in politics and the government, starting with the study of law. When he applied to university, Gates said he saw an “enticing menu of different possibilities” in university catalogs.
In fact, he wrote in his Harvard request test That he had no intention of continuing to focus on computers – telling the university that he was “most interested in business or law”. He told Yale that he wanted to get into government work.
A computer breakthrough intervened in December 1974 with the advent of the first successful mini-mini-computer kit, an electronics company based in the United States. From there, Gates and his Microsoft co -founder, Paul Allen, worked on the development of a new programming language for Altair 8800.
Although he has not become a politician or completed his studies at Harvard, Gates is politically active as a donor and philanthropic. He said he had given a private donation $ 50 million in Pro-Kamala Harris Super-Pac Future ForwardThe New York Times reported in October.
“It is almost impossible to spend time at the congress, even at this lowest level, and not to be swept away by that,” he wrote.