Bill Gates

Bill Gates

William Henry Gates III (Bill) was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington. Bill was the second of three children in an upper middle class family. He enjoyed playing games with the family and was very competitive. He also loved to read. Bill became bored in public school so his family sent him to Lakeside school, a private school, where he excelled in math and science and did well in drama and English.

Gates became interested in computer programming when he was 13, during the era of giant mainframe computers. His school held a fund raiser to purchase a teletype terminal so students could use computer time that was donated by General Electric. Using this time, Gates wrote a tic-tac-toe program using BASIC, one of the first computer languages. Later he created a computer version of Risk, a board game he liked in which the goal is world domination. At Lakeside, Bill met Paul Allen, who shared his interest in computers. Gates and Allen and two other students hacked into a computer belonging to computer center corporation to get free computer time but were caught. After a period of probation, they were allowed back in the computer lab when they offered to fix glitches CCC's software. At age 17, Gates and Allen were paid $20,000 for a program called Traf-O-Data that was used to count traffic.

In early 1973, Bill Gates served as a congressional page in the U.S. House of Representative. He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT and was accepted by Harvard University. Steve Ballmer, who became CEO of Microsoft after Bill retired, was also a Harvard student. Meanwhile, Paul Allen dropped out of Washington College to work on computers at Honeywell Corporation and convinced Gates to drop out of Harvard and join him in starting a new software company in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They called it Micro-soft. This was soon changed to Microsoft and they moved their company to Bellevue, Washington.

In 1980, IBM, one of the largest technology companies of the era, asked Microsoft to write software to run their new personal computer, the IBM PC. Microsoft kept licensing rights for the operating system (MS-DOS) so that they earned money for every computer sold first by IBM and later by all the other companies that made PC computers.
Bill Gates is one of the richest men in the world.