Famous IT Personalities | Famous IT Personalities In

Computers. William Henry “Bill” Gates III. Bill Gates co- founded
'Microsoft Corporation' in 1975 with Paul G. Allen.
Some more information about Bill Gates
 William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and
philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul
Allen.[2][3] During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, chief executive
officer (CEO), president and chief software architect, while also being the largest
individual shareholder until May 2014.[4] He was a major entrepreneur of the microcomputer
revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.
 Gates was born and raised in Seattle. In 1975, he and Allen founded Microsoft in Albuquerque,
New Mexico. It became the world's largest personal computer software company.[5][a] Gates led the
company as chairman and CEO until stepping down as CEO in January 2000, succeeded by Steve
Ballmer, but he remained chairman of the board of directors and became chief software
architect.[8] During the late 1990s, he was criticized for his business tactics, which have been
considered anti-competitive. This opinion has been upheld by numerous court rulings.[9] In June
2008, Gates transitioned to a part-time role at Microsoft and full-time work at the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation, the private charitable foundation he and his then-wife Melinda established in
2000.[10] He stepped down as chairman of the board of Microsoft in February 2014 and assumed a
new post as technology adviser to support the newly appointed CEO Satya Nadella.[11] In March
2020, Gates left his board positions at Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway to focus on his
philanthropic efforts on climate change, global health and development, and education.[12]
 Since 1987, Gates has been included in the Forbes list of the world's wealthiest people.[13][14] From
1995 to 2017, he held the Forbes title of the richest person in the world every year except from
2010 to 2013.[15] In October 2017, he was surpassed by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who
had an estimated net worth of US$90.6 billion compared to Gates's net worth of US$89.9 billion at
the time.[16] As of January 2023, Gates has an estimated net worth of US$108.3 billion, making
him the sixth-richest person in the world.
 Early life of Bill Gates
 Bill Gates was born in Seattle, Washington on October 28, 1955.[3] He is
the son of William H. Gates Sr.[b] (1925–2020) and Mary Maxwell
Gates (1929–1994).[22] His ancestry includes English, German, and
Irish/Scots-Irish.[23] His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother
served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and
the United Way of America. Gates's maternal grandfather was J. W.
Maxwell, a national bank president. Gates has an older sister Kristi
(Kristianne) and a younger sister Libby. He is the fourth of his name in his
family but is known as William Gates III or "Trey" (i.e., three) because his
father had the "II" suffix.[24][25] The family lived in the Sand Point area of
Seattle in a home that was damaged by a rare tornado when Gates was
seven years old.[26]
 Early in his life, Gates observed that his parents wanted him to pursue a
law career.[27] When he was young, his family regularly attended a church
of the Congregational Christian Churches, a Protestant Reformed
denomination.[28][29][30] Gates was small for his age and was bullied as a
child.[25] The family encouraged competition; one visitor reported that "it
didn't matter whether it was hearts or pickleball or swimming to the dock;
there was always a reward for winning and there was always a penalty for
losing .
 At 13, he enrolled in the private Lakeside prep school,[32][33] where he wrote his
first software program.[34] When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers' Club at
the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy a Teletype
Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE)
computer for the students.[35] Gates took an interest in programming the GE system
in BASIC, and he was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote
his first computer program on this machine, an implementation of tic-tac-toe that
allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the
machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly.[36] After the
Mothers Club donation was exhausted, Gates and other students sought time on
systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-
10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC) which banned Gates, Paul
Allen, Ric Weiland, and Gates's best friend and first business partner Kent Evans,
for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to
obtain free computer time.[37][25]
The four students formed the Lakeside Programmers Club to make money.[25] At the
end of the ban, they offered to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for extra
computer time. Rather than using the system remotely via Teletype, Gates went to
CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system,
including Fortran, Lisp, and machine language. The arrangement with CCC continued
until 1970 when the company went out of business.

 The following year, a Lakeside teacher enlisted Gates and Evans to automate the school's
class-scheduling system, providing them computer time and royalties in return. The duo
worked diligently in order to have the program ready for their senior year. Towards the
end of their junior year, Evans was killed in a mountain climbing accident, which Gates
has described as one of the saddest days of his life. Gates then turned to Allen who
helped him finish the system for Lakeside.[25]
 At 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen called Traf-O-Data to make traffic counters
based on the Intel 8008 processor.[38] In 1972, he served as a congressional page in the
House of Representatives.[39][40] He was a National Merit Scholar when he graduated from
Lakeside School in 1973.[41] He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the Scholastic Aptitude
Tests (SAT) and enrolled at Harvard College in the autumn of 1973.[42][43] He chose a pre-
law major but took mathematics (including Math 55) and graduate level computer science
courses.[44] While at Harvard, he met fellow student Steve Ballmer. Gates left Harvard
after two years while Ballmer stayed and graduated magna cum laude. Years later,
Ballmer succeeded Gates as Microsoft's CEO and maintained that position from 2000 until
his resignation in 2014.[45][46]
 Gates devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of
unsolved problems[47] presented in a combinatorics class by professor Harry Lewis. His
solution held the record as the fastest version for over 30 years, and its successor is
faster by only 2%.[47][48] His solution was formalized and published in collaboration with
Harvard computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou.[49]
 Gates remained in contact with Paul Allen and joined him at Honeywell during the
summer of 1974.[50] In 1975, the MITS Altair 8800 was released based on the Intel 8080
CPU, and Gates and Allen saw the opportunity to start their own computer software
company.[51] Gates dropped out of Harvard that same year. His parents were supportive of
him after seeing how much he wanted to start his own company.[52] He explained his
decision to leave Harvard: "if things hadn't worked out, I could always go back to school. I
was officially on leave."[53]
 Basic
 Gates read the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics which demonstrated the Altair 8800, and he
contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) to inform them that he and others were working
on a BASIC interpreter for the platform.[54] In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written
code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS's interest. MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a
demonstration, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a
minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration was held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, New
Mexico; it was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC. MITS hired
Allen,[55] and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with him at MITS in November 1975. Allen
named their partnership "Micro-Soft", a combination of "microcomputer" and "software", and their first office
was in Albuquerque. The first employee Gates and Allen hired was their high school collaborator Ric
Weiland.[55] They dropped the hyphen within a year and officially registered the trade name "Microsoft" with the
Secretary of the State of New Mexico on November 26, 1976.[55] Gates never returned to Harvard to complete his
studies.
 Microsoft's Altair BASIC was popular with computer hobbyists, but Gates discovered that a pre-market copy had
leaked out and was being widely copied and distributed. In February 1976, he wrote an Open Letter to
Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter in which he asserted that more than 90% of the users of Microsoft Altair BASIC
had not paid Microsoft for it and the Altair "hobby market" was in danger of eliminating the incentive for any
professional developers to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality software.[56] This letter was unpopular
with many computer hobbyists, but Gates persisted in his belief that software developers should be able to
demand payment. Microsoft became independent of MITS in late 1976, and it continued to develop programming
language software for various systems.[55] The company moved from Albuquerque to Bellevue, Washington on
January 1, 1979.[54]
 Gates said he personally reviewed and often rewrote every line of code that the company produced in its first
five years. As the company grew, he transitioned into a manager role, then an executive.[57]
 [Link], is a computer game written in 1981 and included with early versions of the PC DOS operating
system distributed with the original IBM PC. It is a driving game in which the player must avoid hitting donkeys.
The game was written by Gates and Neil Konzen.
 IMB Partnership
 IBM, the leading supplier of computer equipment to commercial enterprises at the time, approached
Microsoft in July 1980 concerning software for its upcoming personal computer, the IBM PC,[60] after
Bill Gates's mother, Mary Maxwell Gates, mentioned Microsoft to John Opel, IBM's CEO.[61] IBM first
proposed that Microsoft write the BASIC interpreter. IBM's representatives also mentioned that they
needed an operating system, and Gates referred them to Digital Research (DRI), makers of the widely
used CP/M operating system.[62] IBM's discussions with Digital Research went poorly, however, and
they did not reach a licensing agreement. IBM representative Jack Sams mentioned the licensing
difficulties during a subsequent meeting with Gates and asked if Microsoft could provide an operating
system. A few weeks later, Gates and Allen proposed using 86-DOS, an operating system similar to
CP/M, that Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products (SCP) had made for hardware similar to the
PC.[63] Microsoft made a deal with SCP to be the exclusive licensing agent of 86-DOS, and later the
full owner. Microsoft employed Paterson to adapt the operating system for the PC[64] and delivered it
to IBM as PC DOS for a one-time fee of $50,000.[65]
 The contract itself only earned Microsoft a relatively small fee. It was the prestige brought to
Microsoft by IBM's adoption of their operating system that would be the origin of Microsoft's
transformation from a small business to the leading software company in the world. Gates had not
offered to transfer the copyright on the operating system to IBM because he believed that other
personal computer makers would clone IBM's PC hardware.[65] They did, making the IBM-compatible
PC, running DOS, a de facto standard. The sales of MS-DOS (the version of DOS sold to customers
other than IBM) made Microsoft a major player in the industry.[66] The press quickly identified
Microsoft as being very influential on the IBM PC. PC Magazine asked if Gates was "the man behind
the machine?".[60]
 Gates oversaw Microsoft's company restructuring on June 25, 1981, which re-incorporated the
company in Washington state and made Gates the president and chairman of the board, with Paul
Allen as vice president and vice chairman. In early 1983, Allen left the company after receiving
a Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis, effectively ending the formal business partnership between Gates and
Allen, which had been strained months prior due to a contentious dispute over Microsoft
equity.[54][67] Later in the decade, Gates repaired his relationship with Allen and together the two
donated millions to their childhood school Lakeside.[25] They remained friends until Allen's death in
October 2018.[
 Windows
 Microsoft and Gates launched their first retail version of Microsoft Windows on
November 20, 1985, in an attempt to fend off competition
from Apple's Macintosh GUI, which had captivated consumers with its simplicity and
ease of use.[69] In August of the following year, the company struck a deal
with IBM to develop a separate operating system called OS/2. Although the two
companies successfully developed the first version of the new system, the
partnership deteriorated due to mounting creative differences.[70] The operating
system grew out of DOS in an organic fashion over a decade until Windows 95, which
hid the DOS prompt by default. Windows XP, released one year after Gates stepped
down as Microsoft CEO, was the first to not be based on DOS.[71] Windows 8.1 was
the last version of the OS released before Gates left the chair of the firm to John W.
Thompson on February 5, 2014.
 Management Style
 During Microsoft's early years, Gates was an active software developer, particularly
in the company's programming language products, but his primary role in most of
the company's history was as a manager and executive. He has not officially been on
a development team since working on the TRS-80 Model 100,[73] but he wrote code
that shipped with the company's products as late as 1989.[74] Jerry Pournelle wrote
in 1985 when Gates announced Microsoft Excel: "Bill Gates likes the program, not
because it's going to make him a lot of money (although I'm sure it will do that), but
because it's a neat hack."[75]
 On June 15, 2006, Gates announced that he would transition out of his role at
Microsoft to dedicate more time to philanthropy. He gradually divided his
responsibilities between two successors when he placed Ray Ozzie in charge of
management and Craig Mundie in charge of long-term product strategy.[76] The
process took two years to fully transfer his duties to Ozzie and Mundie, and was
completed on June 27, 2008.[77]
