Born: October 28, 1955
Place of Birth: Seattle, Washington
Major Notes:
Bill Gates is a true visionary and generally considered the wealthiest man in the world.
He was born into a family with a rich heritage and his father was a prominent lawyer.
As a youngster, his intelligence was such that his parents eventually enrolled him into a private school, Lakeside, with an advanced learning environment.
It happened that Lakeside had contracted time on a new form of technology called a computer.
Soon Bill Gates and a fellow student named Paul Allen were spending more time on the computer than on their assignments.
The next year the school contracted time on other computers and Gates and Allen continued to write programs and find bugs in the computer systems and, in fact, set up a
company called "Traf-O-Data".
Following Lakeside, Gates enrolled at Harvard University and soon found himself again working more with computers than regular assignments.
Gates and Allen kept in close touch with each other and were considering forming their own software company.
In 1975, they discovered that a company, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, was bringing out what was thought as a "microcomputer", the Altair 8080, that could be used in sizeable quanities.
Gates and Allen contacted MITS suggesting they had a program in BASIC that could operate on that particular computer.
The company agreed to look at their proposal and, then, since they didn't actually have the program, Gates and Allen went to work writing the code.
The program worked well and a new company called "Micro-Soft" was formed by the two young entreprenaurs.
In 1976, Gates left Harvard and Allen quit his job at MITS so they could both work full-time with Microsoft.
Over the next few years, Gates and Allen had lean years but kept working to perfect their code in the various computer languages.
A key business move was when IBM agreed to buy a series of Microsoft programming languages to use on their computers which were being developed using open architecture.
Bill Gates had worked to develop a version of DOS (Disk Operating System) to work on computers and he successfully brought out a program called MS-DOS.
Microsoft sold its operating system programs to computer manufacturers with a special licensing fee involved every time their OS was installed on a computer.
Gates had a business agreement that computer manufacturers could not sell the MS-DOS to the public, but Microsoft could.
New versions of MS-DOS were released periodically that brought Gates and company further profits.
Gates had seen versions of a new operating system that featured a Graphic User Interface (GUI) where graphic symbols representing code would be controlled by the user using a device called a "mouse".
He decided to develop such a GUI that Microsoft could use to replace its DOS; he called this program "Windows".
It is estimated that 90% of personal computers today use some version of Windows!
Gates set up an important charity known as the "Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation" which has the objective to improve equity in global health and learning.
In addition, Bill Gates has contributed through Microsoft free computers and programs to numerous individuals, public schools, and universities.
There is also the "Gates Millennium Scholarship Program," which supports promising minority students through university programs including graduate school.
William H. Gates III, along with his gifted associates, has brought the power of computers to the world and the benefits are infinite for humanity.
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