Famous People

Bill Gates, born in 1955, an American business executive serves as chairman of Microsoft Corporation, the leading computer software company in the United States. Gates co-founded Microsoft in 1975 with high school friend Paul Allen. The company's success made Gates one of the most influential figures in the computer industry and, eventually, one of the richest people in the world. (Microsoft is the publisher of Encarta Encyclopedia.)

Born in Seattle, Washington, William Henry Gates III attended public school through the sixth grade. In the seventh grade he entered Seattle's exclusive Lakeside School, where he met Allen.

Gates was first introduced to computers and programming languages in 1968, when he was in the eighth grade. That year Lakeside bought a teletype machine that connected to a mainframe computer over phone lines. At the time, the school was one of the few that provided students with access to a computer.

Soon afterward, Gates, Allen, and other students convinced a local computer company to give them free access to its PDP-10, a new minicomputer made by Digital Equipment Corporation. In exchange for the computer time, the students tried to find flaws in the system. Gates spent much of his free time on the PDP-10 learning programming languages such as BASIC, Fortran and LISP.

In 1972, Gates and Allen founded Traf-O-Data, a company that designed and built computerized car-counting machines for traffic analysis. The project introduced them to the programmable 8008 microprocessor from Intel Corporation.

While attending Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1975, Gates teamed with Allen to develop a version of the BASIC programming language for the Altair 8800, the first personal computer. They licensed the software and formed Microsoft to develop versions of BASIC for other computer companies.

Gates decided to drop out of Harvard in his junior year to devote his time to Microsoft. In 1980, Microsoft closed a pivotal deal with International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) to provide the operating system for the IBM PC personal computer. As part of the deal, Microsoft retained the right to license the operating system to other companies.

The success of the IBM PC made the operating system, MS-DOS, an industry standard. Microsoft's revenues skyrocketed as other computer makers licensed MS-DOS and demand for personal computers surged. In 1986, Microsoft offered its stock to the public; by 1987 rapid appreciation of the stock had made Gates, 31, the youngest ever self-made billionaire. In the 1990s, as Microsoft's Windows operating system and Office application software achieved worldwide market dominance, Gates amassed a fortune worth tens of billions of dollars.

In the late 1990s Gates became more involved in philanthropy. With his wife, he established the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which, ranked by assets, quickly became the largest foundation in the world. Gates has also authored two books: ‘The Road Ahead’ (1995; revised, 1996), which details his vision of technology's role in society, and ‘Business @ the Speed of Thought’ (1999), which discusses the role technology can play in running a business.