William Henry Gates
Technology guru, business mogul, and generous philanthropist
William Henry Gates was born on October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington, United States. In one sentence, Gates is a successful entrepreneur, investor, philanthropist, computer programmer, and one of the most influential and wealthiest people on the planet.
Microsoft Corporation, founded by Bill and his hometown friend Paul Allen, is considered the world’s largest software and technology company in the IBM-PC market. It is also one of the world's most valuable companies.
Timeline of the most important events
At the age of 13, Bill got enrolled at Seattle's Lakeside, a private preparatory school. He excelled in many of the taught subjects like Math, Science, English Literature
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This led to his acceptance at Harvard University in the fall of the same year.
At Harvard he reconnected with Paul, who moved to Boston to work as a programmer for Honeywell. Together they founded Microsoft in 1975, and soon signed their first business deal with MITTS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems). The challenge was to develop an operating system using BASIC language for their new Altair 8800 microcomputer. The software, called Altair BASIC, was so successful that Bill had to drop out of Harvard to manage the business. Microsoft expanded very fast, and became specialized in other programing languages such as Cobol, Fortan, and Pascal. Insert Microsoft photo
In 1981 IBM (International Business Machines) were about to launch their first PC (Personal Computer) to the market. They got in touch with Microsoft and inked a historic deal to write the operating software for it. Gates wrote the program and name it MS-DOS, but instead of selling it to IMB, he asked for a licensing fee for each unit sold. This has contributed to the exponential rise of Microsoft as a software company. Insert Allen