Hassan Hassan

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Dr. Augustine Nsang

Major Achievements of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs

The public figures of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs stand as two sides of the same coin; both

simultaneously driving advancements in computing through their respective companies,

Microsoft and Apple. While Jobs is remembered posthumously, Gates is still very much alive,

albeit retired. Regardless, the legacy of both men stands enduring, even in the face of newer

innovations. In many ways even, the innovations of the present day owe it to the initial work

done by the likes of Gates and Jobs.

The introduction of Apple I in 1976 by, Jobs and his then partner Steve Wozniak, marked

a new era for computing. This stylized personal computer was at the time a niche item. It would

have been difficult then, to predict that personal computers would take on widespread

acceptance, and end up being as commonplace in homes as television sets. The Apple I was

released as a desktop computer, complete with a 1 MHz CPU, 4 KB RAM, and a storage

capacity of 456 KB. In the year before, in 1975, another company, Micro Instrumentation and

Telemetry Service (MITS) released the Altair 8800. This system contained the Altair BASIC

interpreter, which happened to be the flagship product of Microsoft, the company synonymous

with Gates.

Jobs was also responsible for the founding of one of the most popular animation studios

in the world in Pixar. Steve Jobs invested $10 million in the company and intended for it to

develop graphics-rendering hardware and software, but it eventually evolved into an animation
studio. The company began collaborating with Disney and produced many popular computer-

animated movies such as Toy Story, Monsters Inc. The Incredible etc. Steve Jobs’ investment

would later yield him $7.4 billion.

With time, Microsoft would come to specialize in the development of operating systems.

In 1980, the company developed MS-DOS, an operating system designed to function with IBM’s

maiden personal computer, the IBM PC. This operating system (OS) was designed to work with

Intel’s 8086 microprocessors and featured a command-line interface (CLI) – a feature that

Windows PCs of the present day still have. The MS-DOS operating system would go on to have

several versions, before being replaced in the 1990s by the Windows OS. Unlike MS-DOS,

Windows introduced a graphical user interface (GUI), as opposed to a command-line. Windows

was also designed to facilitate multiprocessing; where a single OS used more than one processor,

as well as allowing more than one user to exist on a computer system. GUIs however, had

already been in use prior to Windows’s version of it. The Xerox Star 8010 workstation was a

pioneer in this regard, being the first commercially available computer system operating with a

GUI. The technology itself does not have a single clear progenitor, but research dating as far

back as the 1950s and 60s show that the concept existed widely. The program Sketchpad, created

by computer scientist Ivan Sutherland in 1963, is an early example of graphically based design in

computing.

While Gates and Microsoft were making innovations with PCs and operating systems,

Jobs’s company Apple was also following a similar trajectory. The Macintosh computer,

launched in 1984, was significant for being the first PC to come without a programming

language installed inside. The PowerBook, released in 1991, was also noteworthy for being a

primitive design on which the modern laptop is based. What this highlight is that though Jobs
and Gates were not always the pioneers of the technologies their companies marketed, they were

often the first to introduce those technologies or products on a commercial scale. Thus, one of

their greatest achievements is arguably making the power of computing available to the average

person. In earlier decades, the idea of a computer was limited to the work of scientists and in

academia; most famously, being used to facilitate the United States space agency, NASA’s flight

to the Moon.

The innovations of both men in terms of personal computing also coincided with and

inspired changes in, processor technology. As per Moore’s Law – states that the number of

transistors per chip doubles every year – processors have become even more sophisticated and

powerful. Intel, the world’s renowned chip manufacturer, builds processors capable of doing

more than 100 times the work of chipsets contained in the Apple I or Altair 8800. The Intel 4004,

a 4-bit microprocessor, was the first CPU of its kind (a microprocessor) to be made

commercially available, created by Federico Faggin. Unlike older processors which made use of

transistors, the Intel 4004 and microprocessors in general, used smaller components, allowing

them to be housed in smaller computer systems, which in turn has inspired the gradual and

continuous decrease in the size of computer systems.

Steve Jobs, via Apple, is also credited with groundbreaking innovations in mobile phone

technology. Again, as with PC innovations, Jobs merely leveraged existing technologies using

the appeal of his Apple brand to make them commercially available and mainstream. The

iPhone, released in 2007, was certainly not the first smartphone, or touchscreen device, but it

was among the first to be marketed to commercial customers; as opposed to being limited to

enterprise customers. The iPhone has become somewhat of a gold standard for measuring

smartphones, with a user interface that has been praised for its simplicity.
 Besides Jobs and Gates, other prominent figures in the world of computing exist. Most

notably, Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with the creation of the world wide web, which he

developed while working at CERN. This made it possible for “web pages” to be written in a

hypertext markup language, or HTML, and communication through protocols such as TCP/IP.

The web has given us an Internet of internets of sorts, which is itself another commercial

application of an already existing technology. The original internet, ARPANET, existed as more

of a military and academic resource, unlike the world wide web of today.

Advancements in computing are still very much ongoing, with plenty of innovation

taking place on an almost daily basis, with newer technologies on the horizon, and capabilities

such as artificial intelligence being harnessed, there is seemingly no limit to what can be

achieved through computing. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs can be seen as pace-setters in this regard,

pioneers of their day who were not afraid to push the boundaries, such that the general public

could have access to computing technologies. They remain influential even to this day, with their

respective companies continuing to lead the way in terms of innovation.