FAST FACTS
BORN: October 28, 1955
NATIVE CITY: Seattle, Washington
EDUCATION: Public elementary school. Entered private Lakeside School at age twelve. Dropped out of Harvard University junior year.
LITTLE KNOWN FACT: His family called him "Trey," in reference to the III after
his name.
HOBBIES: Bridge, golf, reading, philanthropy. Donated $6 billion to his charitable foundation in August 1999, the largest bequest ever by a living
individual.
FAMILY: wife, Melinda; daughter, Jennifer, born 1996; son, Rory, born 1999.
Skinny, shy and awkward, teenaged Bill Gates seemed an unlikely successor to his overachieving parents. His father, powerfully built and 6'6'' tall, was a prominent Seattle attorney, and his gregarious mother served on
charitable boards and ran the United Way. While he showed enormous talent for math and logic, young Bill, a middle child, was no one's idea of a natural leader, let alone a future billionaire who would reinvent American business.
Born in 1955, Gates attended public elementary school, and enrolled in the private Lakeside School at age twelve. The following year, Gates wrote his first computer program, at a time when computers were still room-sized machines run by scientists in white coats. Soon afterwards, he and his friend Paul Allen wrote a scheduling program for the school--which coincidentally placed the two in the same classes as the prettiest girls in school. Still in high
school, Gates and Allen founded a company called Traf-O-Data which analyzed city traffic data.
Gates set off for Harvard University intending to become a lawyer like his father. Still shy and awkward, he rarely ventured out to parties unless dragged by
his friend Steve Ballmer, whom he later repaid by naming him president of Microsoft.
One day in December 1974, Allen, who was working at Honeywell outside of Boston, showed Gates a Popular Mechanics cover featuring the Altair 8800, a
$397 computer from M.I.T.S. computing that any hobbyist could build. The only thing the computer lacked, besides a keyboard and monitor, was software. Gates and Allen contacted the head of M.I.T.S. and said they
could provide a version of BASIC for the Altair.
After a successful demonstration at the company's Albuquerque headquarters, M.I.T.S. contracted with Gates and Allen for programming languages. The pair moved to New Mexico and started Micro-soft (they dropped the hypen
later). Although the company's first five clients went bankrupt, the company struggled on, moving to Seattle in 1979. The following year, IBM asked Gates to provide an operating system for its first personal computer.
Gates purchased a system called QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) for $50,000 from another company, changed the name to MS-DOS, and licensed it to
IBM. The IBM PC took the market by storm when it was introduced in 1981--and licensing fees streamed into Microsoft, ensuring the company's survival over the next several years.
Microsoft continued concentrating on the software market, adding consumer applications like Microsoft Word. In 1986, when the company went public, Gates became a paper billionaire at the age of thirty-one. The following year, the company introduced its first version of Windows, and by 1993 was selling a million copies a month. When Windows 95 was introduced in August 1995, 7 million copies were sold in the first six weeks alone. Microsoft's software became so ubiquitous that the U.S. Justice Department began
a series of long-lasting antitrust investigations against the company, bogging it down in protracted legal battles.
In 1995, Gates dramatically changed the direction of the entire company and focused on the Internet. While some of his efforts, including the much hyped Microsoft Network and its highly touted Web "shows", fizzled, the
company quickly gained ground on Netscape with its popular Internet Explorer browser.
Meanwhile, Gates built a 40,000-square-foot technological showcase of a home on Lake Washington and in 1994, married Melinda French, a marketing executive at Microsoft. At the same time, Gates increased his charitable giving,
setting aside $17 billion in endowments for the William H. Gates Foundation (later renamed the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), which promotes increased access to innovative technology in education and global health, as well as promoting community projects in the Pacific Northwest. He earmarked $6 billion in August 1999 to speed the development
and reduce costs of vaccines for malaria, tuberculosis, and AIDS.
© 2000 A&E Television Networks. All rights reserved.
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