Gates co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975, and it’s since then become the largest PC software company in the world.
Bill Gates – Key Facts
He was born as William Henry Gates III on October 28th, 1955.
He started programming when he was in his teens.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen started their own computer software company called Microsoft in 1975 after dropping out of Harvard.
In 1977, Microsoft opened its first international office in Japan.
In 1985, the first retail version of Microsoft Windows was released.
Gates became a billionaire in 1987.
In 1994, Bill Gates and Melinda French got married.
In 2008, Gates stepped from his position as a CEO so that he could focus on doing work for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which he founded with his wife.
Early Life
Bill Gates, or actually William Henry Gates III, was born on the 28th of October 1955 in Seattle, Washington. He is the son of William H. Gates Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates.
The Gates family highly encouraged competition; it didn’t matter what it was, there was always a reward for winning, and there was always a penalty for losing.
When he was 13 years old, Bill joined the Lakeside School; and when he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers’ Club at the school used proceeds to purchase a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the school’s students.
Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. It was on that machine that he programmed his first software program on – a game of tic-tac-toe that allowed the players to compete against the computer.
The Computer Center Corporation (CCC), eventually banned Gates for the summer, after it caught him and three friends exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.
The four students formed the Lakeside Programmers Club as a way to earn some money. At the end of the ban, they offered to find bugs in CCC’s software in exchange for computer time. This was when Gates began to study coding. It was also during this time that he also coded the school’s class scheduling system. Initially, he did it together with Kent Evans, but unfortunately, he was killed in a mountain climbing accident at the end of their junior year, so Allen stepped in.
Allen and Gates founded their first company, Traf-O-Data, during their senior year. They made traffic counters on the Intel 8008 processor.
In 1973, he was accepted into Harvard. During his university journey, he developed the BASIC programming language for the world’s first PC – the MITS Affair.
However, Gates dropped out just a few years later without finishing his degree so that he and Paul Allen could focus on founding Microsoft.
Elena Rostova holds a Master's degree in Public Health Journalism. She covers groundbreaking medical research, holistic wellness trends, mental health awareness, and nutritional science.
