Bill Gates

Bill Gates, Chairman/Co-Founder/Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation

William Henry Gates III was born on October 28, 1955, to William H. Gates II, an attorney, and Mary Maxwell Gates, a schoolteacher. Gates and his two sisters, Kristianne and Libby, grew up in Seattle, Washington. His family called him "Trey". His grandmother gave him his nickname because it is a card player's term for three (Lowe 3). On January 1, 1994, Bill married Melinda French, a Product Manager/Marketing Executive at Microsoft. They have two children, Jennifer Katharine, born in 1996, and Rory John, born in 1999. Early on in life, it was apparent that he inherited the ambition, intelligence, and competitive spirit that had helped his progenitors rise to the top in their chosen professions. In elementary school he quickly surpassed all of his peer's abilities in nearly all subjects, especially math and science. He read the World Book Encyclopedia from A to Z by the time he was nine years old. He was so far ahead that he often became bored (Dickinson 12). His parents recognized is intelligence and decided to enroll him in the exclusive Lakeside Private School, an all-boys institution known for its intense academic environment. There he also met his best friend and business partner, Paul Allen.

In 1968, when he was in the eighth grade, his teachers introduced him to computers and programming languages. This was at a time when computers were still room-sized machines run by scientists in white coats. Bill's first program was a tic-tac-toe game, which he made on a mainframe that the school bought after a fund-raiser. The team also wrote a scheduling program for the school--which coincidentally placed the two in the same classes as the prettiest girls in school (Biography.com 1). Soon afterward, Gates and Allen, along with other students convinced a local computer company, Digital Equipment Corporation, to give them free access to its PDP-10, a new minicomputer. In exchange for the time, the students checked for flaws in the system. Gates spent much of this time on the PDP-10 learning programming languages such as BASIC, FORTRAN, and LISP. In 1972, while still in high school, Gates and Allen founded Traf-O-Data, a company that designed and built computerized car-counting machines for traffic analysis. The company did not prove profitable because it only earned $20,000 in its first year. The good thing that came out of this project was being introduced to the programmable 8008 microprocessor from Intel Corporation.

Bill Gates won admission to Princeton, Yale, and Harvard University as a National Merit Scholar. He chose Harvard and entered in the fall of 1973, where he lived down the hall from Steve Ballmer, now Microsoft's president and CEO. His heart didn't seem to be in his studies. He slacked off a bit, always trying to get the highest grades by putting in the least amount of time. . He got good grades in the subject he liked, and neglected those that were of little interest. He always had a deep passion for mathematics and a keen ability to see a short cut to solve any problem. In fact, he scored a perfect 800 on the math portion of the SAT. With a near-photographic memory, he was able to pass classes with little effort, and not the best grades (Dickinson 23-24). While at Harvard, Gates teamed up with Allen and developed a version of the BASIC programming language for the first microcomputer--The Altair 8800. They licensed the software to the manufacturer of the Altair, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and formed Microsoft (originally Micro-soft) 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 1978, a man named Kuzuhiko (Kay) Nishi called Bill. At the time, Nishi was publishing a popular Japanese hackers' magazine, ASCII, and distributing software. He had read about Microsoft and was interested in its software. A few months later, he went to Microsoft where the two made a deal. Nishi paid $150M--mainly for exclusive rights to license MS-BASIC in Asia. They remained business partners for eight years, providing Microsoft with a link to Japan and making it the second largest market after the United States. Today, 58% of Microsoft's total revenue comes from international markets (Dickinson 32). Although the company's first five clients went bankrupt, the company struggled on, moving to Seattle in 1979.

In the early 1980s, IBM was having trouble finding an operating system to go on their new computer, which used the new 8088 microprocessor. Bill, of course, said he would be happy to make them one. However, he didn't quite make an operating system; In what must be the deal of the century, he purchased a system called 86-DOS or Q-DOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from Seattle Computer Products for $50,000, hired their leading engineer on the project, Tim Patterson, improved it a little, and licensed it to IBM for tons of money. So, on the contrary to public opinion, he did not write MS-DOS; he bought it, changed it slightly, and put his name on it (Corbett 1).

Bill Gates took Microsoft public in March 1986, earning himself a huge paper profit of over $300 million. He was the company's largest individual shareholder; he owned about 45% of the company's stock. It made an initial stock offering on March 13, 1986 at $21 per share. Within days, the price rose to $35.50. When it hit $90.75, Gates became the youngest billionaire ever (Lowe 40). Within a decade, his net worth had reached into the tens of thousands of dollars--making him by some estimates the world's richest private individual. As of July 1996, his total current worth was approximately $18 billion. To fully understand how much money Gates has accumulated, consider this, $18 billion is enough to pay the salary of The President of the United States for the next ninety thousand years. Note: This is based on the base salary of $200,000, per the New York Public Library (Dickinson 6). In January 1998, Microsoft stock split for the seventh time since going public. At that time, adjusted for splits, $10,000 invested in the initial public offering would have been worth $2.4 million (Lowe 40). Acquisition of immense wealth before the age of 40 seemed to have little outward effect on Gates, whose greatest personal expenditures may have been a collection of expensive sports cars and the construction of a $50 million computer-controlled private complex on a bluff overlooking Lake Washington, which is a short daily commute from Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington (brittannica.com 1).

Microsoft and IBM cooperated on