bill gates timeline

Bill Gates' Profile/Timeline:

1955 - William Henry Gates III was born on October 28th in Seattle, Washington
1955 - Popularly known as Bill Gates, his family called him "Trey" when he was little
1967 - Bill enrolled in the Lakeside School in Seattle and met Paul Allen
1969 - Bill and Paul (a.k.a "Lakeside Programming Group") reported bugs in exchange for computer time
1972 - Bill and Paul formed Traf-O-Data and developed hardware/software to record highway traffic
1973 - Bill Gates graduated from Lakeside High and enrolled in Harvard University, where he majored in pre-law
1974 - Bill Gates and Paul Allen formed Micro-soft

1975 - Bill and Paul wrote the first computer language called BASIC and licensed it to
MITS
1976 - Bill wrote software routines for BASIC on the Altair to use diskettes for storage
1976 - Gates wrote his famous "Open Letter to Hobbyists", accusing them of software piracy
1976 - Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard
1977 - Bill Gates and Paul Allen officially registers a partnership, and Micro-soft became
Microsoft
1980 - Tim Paterson begans writing an OS for use on Seattle Computer Products' (SCP)
8086-based computer
1980 - IBM repesentatives met Gates and Steve Ballmer to write the OS for their upcoming computer
1980 - They met again and IBM showed the "Acorn" computer running on an 8-bit 8080 processor
1980 - Gates recommended the use of a 16-bit 8086 processor instead and promised an operating system
1980 - SCP ships QDOS 0.10 (Quick & Dirty Operating System)
1980 - Paul Allen approached SCP and purchased the right to resell to an unnamed client for $50,000 - IBM
1980 - Microsoft proposed to be in-charged of IBM's entire software development and convert DOS for IBM's PC
1981 - Microsoft bought all the rights to SCP's DOS and renamed it MS-DOS
1981 - IBM introduced its first desktop, Datamaster, which ran on the 16-bit 8086 CPU
and Microsoft's MS-DOS
1983 - Microsoft announced Windows 1.0
1985 - Bill Gates gave keynote speech at Comdex
1985 - Microsoft released Windows 1.0
1986 - Microsoft is taken public at an IPO price of $21/share
1986 - Bill Gates became a billionaire at 31 years old - the yougest person to do so
1990 - Microsoft released Windows 3.0 and Microsoft sales topped $1 billion for the first time
1994 - Bill Gates and Melinda French got married in Hawaii on January 1st
1994 - Bill Gates becomes the richest person in America
1995 - Microsoft released Windows 95 and Bill Gates became the richest person in the world
1996 - Jennifer Katherine Gates was born on April 26th
1998 - Bill, Melinda and Jennifer moved into their new multi-million dollar house in
Medina, Washington
1998 - Microsoft releases Windows 98
1999 - Bill's fortunes swell to $90 billion and maintains his position on Forbes list as the wealthiest person alive
2000 - Microsoft releases Windows 2000 and Windows ME
2001 - Microsoft releases Windows XP
2002 - Stocks and lawsuits bring his Gates' net worth down to $53 billion - still good enough for #1 on Forbes list
2003 - Microsoft releases Windows Server 2003

2006 - Microsoft releases Windows Vista?

bill gates personal life

Bill Gates married Melinda French of Dallas, Texas on January 1, 1994. Melinda has given birth to three children, Jennifer Katharine Gates (1996), Rory John Gates (1999) and Phoebe Adele Gates (2002). Bill Gates' house is one of the most expensive houses in the world, and is a modern 21st century earth-sheltered home in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington. According to King County public records, as of 2006, the total assessed value of the property (land and house) is $125 million, and the annual property tax is just under $1 million. Also among Gates's private
acquisitions are the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci which
Gates bought for $30.8 million at an auction in 1994, and a rare Gutenberg Bible.

In 2000, Gates founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a charitable organization, with his wife. The foundation's grants have provided funds for college scholarships for under-represented minorities, AIDS prevention, diseases prevalent in third world countries, and other causes. In 2000, the Gates Foundation endowed the University of Cambridge with $210 million for the Gates Cambridge Scholarships. The Foundation has also pledged over $7 billion to its various causes, including $1 billion to the United
Negro College Fund; and as of 2005, had an estimated endowment of $29.0 billion. He has spent about a third of his lifetime income on charity. Journalist Greg Palast suggests that the Gates Foundation is used to make tactical donations to hide media sensitive humanitarian side effects of treaties, such as the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which Gates has supported. TRIPS requires countries to agree to respect drug and other patents, therefore preventing the local manufacture of existing pharmaceuticals still under patent such as AIDS drugs in Africa.

Gates has received two honorary doctorates, from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden in 2002 and Waseda University in 2005. Gates was also given an honorary KBE (Knighthood) from Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom in 2005, in addition to having entomologists name the Bill Gates flower fly, Eristalis gatesi, in his honor.

Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer has stated that Gates is probably the most "spammed" person in the world, receiving as many as 4,000,000 e-mails per day in 2004, most of which were junk. Gates has almost an entire department devoted to filtering out junk emails. In an article, Gates himself has said that most of this junk mail "offers to help [him] get out of debt or get rich quick", which "would be funny [given his financial state] if it weren't so irritating".

bill gates microsoft

In December of 1974, Allen was on his way to visit Gates when along the way he stopped to browse the current magazines. What he saw changed his and Bill Gates's lives forever. On the cover of
Popular Electronics was a picture of the Altair 8080 and the headline "World's First Microcomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models." He bought the issue and rushed over to Gates's dorm room. They both recognized this as their big opportunity. The two knew that the home computer market was about to explode and that someone would need to make software for the new machines. Within a few days, Gates had called MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), the makers of the Altair. He told the company that he and Allen had developed a BASIC that could be used on the Altair
[Teamgates.com, 9/29/96]. This was a lie. They had not even written a line of code. They had neither an Altair nor the chip that ran the computer. The MITS company did not
know this and was very interested in seeing their BASIC. So, Gates and Allen began working feverishly on the BASIC they had promised. The code for the program was left mostly up to Bill Gates while Paul Allen began working on a way to simulate the Altair with the schools PDP-10. Eight weeks later, the two felt their program was ready. Allen was to fly to MITS and show off their creation. The day after Allen arrived at MITS, it was time to test their BASIC. Entering the program into the company's Altair was the first time Allen had ever touched one. If the Altair simulation he designed or any of Gates's code was faulty, the demonstration would most likely have ended in failure. This was not the case, and the program worked perfectly the first time [Wallace, 1992, p. 80]. MITS arranged a deal with Gates and Allen to buy the rights to their BASIC.[Teamgates.com, 9/29/96] Gates was convinced that the software market had been born. Within a year, Bill Gates had dropped out of Harvard and Microsoft was formed.

bill gates quotes

If you can't make it good, at least make it look good.”
Famous saying

Life is not fair, get used to it.
Life saying

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
Business saying

Patience is a key element of success.
Investment saying

DOS is ugly and interferes with users' experience.
Technology saying

Microsoft is not about greed. It's about innovation and fairness.
Microsoft saying

People everywhere love Windows.
Famous saying

Let's face it, the average computer user has the brain of a Spider Monkey.
Computer saying

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.
Inspirational saying

Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.
Wealth saying


It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.
Inspirational saying

As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.
Inspirational saying

If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.
Experience saying

We are not even close to finishing the basic dream of what the PC can be.
Computer saying

We've got to put a lot of money into changing behavior.
Famous saying

Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It’s a good thing we have museums to document that.
Microsoft saying

Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Life saying

I believe that if you show people the problems and you show them the solutions they will be moved to act.
Experience saying

The best way to prepare to be a programmer is to write programs and to study great programs that other people have written.
Technology saying

In this business, by the time you realize you're in trouble, it's too late to save yourself. Unless you're running scared all the time, you're gone.
Business saying

Whether it's Google or Apple or free software, we've got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.
Business saying

Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you, Find yourself.
Life saying

Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spa-m every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren't so exciting.
Famous saying

Hey, I never told anyone to buy my stock! Besides, no one is less happy than I am with the performance of Microsoft stock! I've lost tens of billions of dollars this year-if you check, you'll see that that's more than most people make in a lifetime!
Stock saying

I have 100 billion dollars... You realize I could spend 3 million dollars a day, every day, for the next 100 years? And that's if I don't make another dime. Tell you what-I'll buy your right arm for a million dollars. I give you a million bucks, and I get to sever your arm right here.
Wealth saying

As you improve health in a society, population growth goes down. You know, I thought it was... before I learned about it, I thought it was paradoxical.
Intelligent saying

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top - I'm afraid that's not quite right.
Famous saying

Capitalism is this wonderful thing that motivates people, it causes wonderful inventions to be done. But in this area of diseases of the world at large, it's really let us down.
Intelligent saying

I actually thought that it would be a little confusing during the same period of your life to be in one meeting when you're trying to make money, and then go to another meeting where you're giving it away.
Life saying

I do think this next century, hopefully, will be about a more global view. Where you don't just think, yes my country is doing well, but you think about the world at large.
Life saying

I don't think there's anything unique about human intellience. All the nuerons in the brain that make up perceptions and emotions operate in a binary fashion.
Intelligent saying

I have drifted away from thinking about these philanthropic things. And it was only as the wealth got large enough and Melinda and I had talked about the view that that wealth wasn't something that would be good to just pass to the children.
Wealth saying

I mean, if we said right now, there's somebody in the next room who's dying, let's all go save their life, you know, everybody would just get up immediately and go get involved in that.
Famous saying

I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.
Computer saying

I'm sorry that we have to have a Washington presence. We thrived during our first 16 years without any of this. I never made a political visit to Washington and we had no people here. It wasn't on our radar screen. We were just making great software.
Famous saying

In the decade ahead I can predict that we will provide over twice the productivity improvement that we provided in the '90s.
Famous saying

Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don't think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the other.
Communication saying

Is the rich world aware of how four billion of the six billion live? If we were aware, we would want to help out, we'd want to get involved.
Life saying

It's been shown that most people download viruses unwittingly - they don't know they're doing it until it's too late. That's what I mean here. We're talking about protecting the consumer.
Computer saying

Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.
Funny saying

Oh, I think there are a lot of people who would be buying and selling online today that go up there and they get the information, but then when it comes time to type in their credit card they think twice because they're not sure about how that might get out and what that might mean for them.
Online Degree saying

People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn't they? People feared coal, they feared gas-powered engines... There will always be ignorance, and ignorance leads to fear. But with time, people will come to accept their silicon masters.
Intelligent saying

Security is, I would say, our top priority because for all the exciting things you will be able to do with computers - organizing your lives, staying in touch with people, being creative - if we don't solve these security problems, then people will hold back.
Computer saying

Since when has the world of computer software design been about what people want? This is a simple question of evolution. The day is quickly coming when every knee will bow down to a silicon fist, and you will all beg your binary gods for mercy.
Funny saying

So we do software for watches, for phones, for TV sets, for cars. And some of these take a long time to catch on.
Business saying

Some people read off of their Palms and Pocket PCs, but the real immersible reading experience takes a full-screen device.
Computer saying

The browser space that we are in we have about 90 percent. Sure, Firefox has come along, and the press love the idea of that. Our commitment is to keep our browser that competes with Firefox to be the best browser - best in security, best in features.
Computer saying

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
Technology saying

The huge turnout for Live 8 here and around the world proves that thanks to the leadership from people like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown the world is beginning to demand more action on global health and poverty.
Life saying

The Internet will help achieve "friction free capitalism" by putting buyer and seller in direct contact and providing more information to both about each other.
Famous saying

The reason you see open source there at all is because we came in and said or quotations, there should be a platform that's identical with millions and millions of machines.
Famous saying

The two areas that are changing... are information technology and medical technology. Those are the things that the world will be very different 20 years from now than it is today.
Technology saying

There are people who don't like capitalism, and people who don't like PCs. But there's no-one who likes the PC who doesn't like Microsoft.
Famous saying

There are some things that we are always thinking about. For example, when will speech recognition be good enough for everybody to use that? And we have made a lot more progress this year on that. I think we will surprise people a bit on how well we will do on our speech recognition.
Famous saying

There's always a tricky issue when you get into stolen material or pornography. The laws for online publishing the same as for print-based publishing, where if you're hosting certain types of things and somebody notifies you about that.
Computer saying

What we're really after is simply that people acquire a legal license for Windows for each computer they own before they move on to Linux or Sun Solaris or BSD or OS/2 or whatever.
Microsoft saying

When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.
Famous saying

When you want to do your homework, fill out your tax return, or see all the choices for a trip you want to take, you need a full-size screen.
Funny saying

Windows 2000 already contains features such as the human discipline component, where the PC can send an electric shock through the keyboard if the human does something that does not please Windows.
Funny saying

The Internet will help achieve "friction free capitalism" by putting buyer and seller in direct contact and providing more information to both about each other.
Famous saying

Paper is no longer a big part of my day. I get 90% of my news online, and when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC. It's fully synchronized with my office machine so I have all the files I need.
Computer saying

Microsoft has had its success by doing low-cost products and constantly improving those products and we've really redefined the IT industry to be something that's about a tool for individuals.
Microsoft saying
We are always saying to ourself.. we have to innovate. We got to come up with that breakthrough. In fact, theway software works.. so long as you are using your existing software.. you don't pay us anything at all. So we're only paid for breakthroughs
Famous saying

It's pretty incredible to look back 30 years to when Microsoft was starting and realize how work has been transformed. We're finally getting close to what I call the digital workstyle.
Microsoft saying

There is a certain responsibility that accrued to me when I got to this unexpected position.
Famous saying

bill gates role

Bill Gates giving his deposition at Microsoft on August 27, 1998

Since Microsoft's founding in 1975 and as of 2006, Gates has had primary responsibility for Microsoft's product strategy. He has aggressively broadened the company's range of products, and wherever Microsoft has achieved a dominant position he has vigorously defended it. Many decisions that have led to antitrust litigation over Microsoft's business practices have had Gates' approval. In the 1998 United States v. Microsoft case, Gates gave deposition testimony that several journalists characterized as evasive. He argued
over the definitions of words such as: compete, concerned, ask, and we. BusinessWeek reported, "early rounds of his deposition show him offering obfuscatory answers and saying 'I don't recall' so many times that even the presiding judge had to chuckle. Worse, many of the technology chief's denials and pleas of ignorance were directly refuted by prosecutors with snippets of e-mail Gates both sent and received."  Despite denials by Bill Gates, the judge ruled that Microsoft had committed monopolization and tying,
blocking competition, in violation of the Sherman Act.

Gates meets regularly with Microsoft's senior managers and program managers. By all accounts he can be extremely confrontational during these meetings, particularly when he believes that managers have not thought out their business strategy or have placed the company's future at risk.  He has been described shouting at length at employees before letting them continue, with such remarks as "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard!" and "Why don't you just give up your options and join the Peace Corps?" However, he often backs down when the targets of his outbursts respond frankly and directly.When he is not impressed with the technical hurdles managers claim to be facing, he sometimes quips, "Do you want me to do it over the weekend?"

Gates' role at Microsoft for most of its history has been primarily a management and executive role. However, he was an active software developer in the early years, particularly on the company's programming language products. He has not officially been

on a development team since working on the TRS-80 Model 100 line, but he wrote code as late as 1989 that shipped in the company's products.

On June 15, 2006, Gates announced his plans to transition out of a day-to-day role with Microsoft effective July 31, 2008, to allow him to devote more time to working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. During an interview with Fortune.com published on June 26 says his recent decision to "shift priorities" his day-to-day role has changed to June 2008 instead of the original date of July 2008. After that date, Gates will continue in
his role as the company's chairman and act as an advisor on key projects. His role as Chief Software Architect will be filled immediately by Ray Ozzie who joined the company last year due to Microsoft taking over his company Groove. One of his last initiatives before announcing his departure was the creation of a robotics software group at Microsoft.

bill gates early life

Early life

Bill Gates III was born in Seattle, Washington to William H. Gates, Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates. His family was wealthy; his father was a prominent lawyer, his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate Bank and The United Way, and her father, J. W. Maxwell, was a national bank president.Gates has one older sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and one younger sister, Libby.

According to the 1992 biography Hard Drive, Maxwell set up a million-dollar trust fund for Gates the year he was born. Gates vehemently denied this in a 1994 interview with Playboy:

PLAYBOY: Did you have a million-dollar trust fund while you were at Harvard? GATES: Not true. Where does this randomness come from? You think it's a better myth to have started with a bunch of money and made money than to have started without? In what sense? My parents are very successful, and I went to the nicest private school in the Seattle area. I was lucky. But I never had any trust funds of any kind, though my dad did pay my tuition at Harvard, which was quite expensive.

The 1993 biography Gates calls the trust fund claim one of the "fictions" surrounding
Gates' fortune.

Gates excelled in elementary school, particularly in mathematics and the sciences. He attended the Lakeside School, Seattle's most exclusive preparatory school where tuition in 1967 was $5,000 (Harvard tuition that year was $1,760). Lakeside rented time on a DEC PDP-10 owned by Computer Center Corporation. Gates and other students exploited bugs in the system software until CCC banned them, at which point Gates says he swore off computers for a year and a half.

CCC approached the Lakeside students in 1968 because other users were continuing to exploit the flaws in their system software. The company offered them unlimited computer time in exchange for finding and fixing software problems. Gates identified this as the point at which he became devoted to computing. The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970, when it went out of business. The following year Information Sciences Inc. hired the Lakeside students to write a payroll program in COBOL, providing them not
only computer time but royalties as well. Gates also formed a venture, called Traf-O-Data, with Lakeside student Paul Allen, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor.


Bill Gates was arrested at least twice in New Mexico: once in 1975 for speeding and driving without a license, and in 1977 when this photograph was taken.

According to a press inquiry, Bill Gates scored 1590 on his SATs, which at the time corresponded to an IQ of 170 -a figure frequently reported in the popular media (co- founder Paul Allen scored a perfect 1600), and was able to enroll at Harvard University in the fall of 1973 to pursue a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science and pre-law. It was there he met his future business partner, Steve Ballmer.

Microsoft

Main article: Microsoft

After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair
8800, Gates called MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others had developed a version of the programming languageBASIC for the platform. This was untrue, as Gates and Allen had never used an Altair previously nor developed any code for it. In a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. Allen and Gates flew to MITS to unveil the new BASIC system. The demonstration was
a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to buy the rights to Allen and Gates's BASIC for the Altair platform. It was at this point that Gates left Harvard to found Micro-Soft, which later became Microsoft Corporation, with Allen.Gates dropped out of Harvard to work at MITS's offices in Albuquerque.

Anti-piracy efforts


In 1984, Bill Gates appeared on the cover of TIME Magazine; he has since appeared seven more times.

In February 1976, Gates published his often-quoted "Open Letter to Hobbyists". In the letter, Gates claimed that most users were using "stolen" pirated copies of Altair BASIC and that no hobbyist could afford to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality
software without payment. This letter was unpopular with many amateur programmers, not just those few using copies of the software. In the ensuing years the letter gained significant support from Gates' business partners and allies. Eventually, the closed source,for-profit model Gates had envisioned would become the dominant model of software production and distribution, largely displacing the hobbyist model of open source software produced and distributed for free. Despite Microsoft's reliance on closed source, Gates has said that he collected discarded program listings at Harvard and learned programming techniques from them.

Gates with Steve Jurvetson of DFJ, Stratton Sclavos of Verisign and Greg Papadopoulos of Sun Microsystems, October 1, 2004

Microsoft and IBM

In 1980 IBM approached Microsoft to make the BASIC interpreter for its upcoming personal computer, the IBM PC. When IBM's representatives mentioned that they needed an operating system, Bill Gates referred them to Digital Research, makers made the widely used CP/M operating system that ran on a related type of microprocessor.
When IBM's representatives did not reach immediate agreement with DR, they went back to Gates to ask about alternatives. Gates offered to provide a CP/M compatible operating system himself; He licensed a CP/M-compatible OS called QDOS ("Quick and Dirty Operating System") from Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products, had it adapted for the PC, and IBM shipped this as PC-DOS.

Later, after Compaq successfully cloned the IBM BIOS, the market saw a flood of IBM PC clones.Microsoft was quick to license DOS to other manufacturers, calling it MS- DOS (for Microsoft DiskOperating System). By marketing MS-DOS aggressively to manufacturers of IBM-PC clones, Microsoft went from a small player to one of the major software vendors in the home computer industry. Microsoft continued to develop operating systems as well as software applications.

Windows

See also: History of Microsoft Windows

In the early 1980s Microsoft introduced its own version of the graphical user interface (GUI), based on ideas originally pioneered by the Xerox corporation, and further pioneered and developed by Apple. Microsoft released "Windows" as an alternative to their DOS command line, and to compete with other systems on the market that
employed a GUI. By the early 1990s, Windows had pushed other DOS-based GUIs like GEM and GEOS out of the market. The release of Windows 3.0 in 1990 was a tremendous success, selling around 10 million copies in the first two years and cementing Microsoft's dominance in operating systems sales.
By continuing to ensure, by various means, that most computers came with Microsoft software pre-installed, the Microsoft corporation eventually became the largest software company in the world, earning Gates enough money that Forbes Magazine named him the wealthiest person in the world for several years. Gates served as the CEO of the company until 2000, when Steve Ballmer took the position, and continues to serve as chairman of the board as of September 2006. Microsoft has thousands of patents, and Gates has nine patents to his name.

billgates

William H. Gates
Chairman
Microsoft Corporation



William (Bill) H. Gates is chairman of Microsoft Corporation, the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. Microsoft had revenues of US$39.79 billion for the fiscal year ending June 2005, and employs more than 61,000 people in 102 countries and regions.

On June 15, 2006, Microsoft announced that effective July 2008 Gates will transition out of a day-to-day role in the company to spend more time on his global health and education work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. After July 2008 Gates will continue to serve as Microsoft’s chairman and an advisor on key development projects. The two-year transition process is to ensure that there is a smooth and orderly transfer of Gates’ daily responsibilities. Effective June 2006, Ray Ozzie has assumed Gates’ previous title as chief software architect and is working side by side with Gates on all technical architecture and product oversight responsibilities at Microsoft. Craig Mundie has assumed the new title of chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft and is working closely with Gates to assume his responsibility for the company’s research and incubation efforts.

Born on Oct. 28, 1955, Gates grew up in Seattle with his two sisters. Their father, William H. Gates II, is a Seattle attorney. Their late mother, Mary Gates, was a schoolteacher, University of Washington regent, and chairwoman of United Way International.

Gates attended public elementary school and the private Lakeside School. There, he discovered his interest in software and began programming computers at age 13.

In 1973, Gates entered Harvard University as a freshman, where he lived down the hall from Steve Ballmer, now Microsoft's chief executive officer. While at Harvard, Gates developed a version of the programming language BASIC for the first microcomputer - the MITS Altair.

In his junior year, Gates left Harvard to devote his energies to Microsoft, a company he had begun in 1975 with his childhood friend Paul Allen. Guided by a belief that the computer would be a valuable tool on every office desktop and in every home, they began developing software for personal computers. Gates' foresight and his vision for personal computing have been central to the success of Microsoft and the software industry.

Under Gates' leadership, Microsoft's mission has been to continually advance and improve software technology, and to make it easier, more cost-effective and more enjoyable for people to use computers. The company is committed to a long-term view, reflected in its investment of approximately $6.2 billion on research and development in the 2005 fiscal year.

In 1999, Gates wrote Business @ the Speed of Thought, a book that shows how computer technology can solve business problems in fundamentally new ways. The book was published in 25 languages and is available in more than 60 countries. Business @ the Speed of Thought has received wide critical acclaim, and was listed on the best-seller lists of the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and Amazon.com. Gates' previous book, The Road Ahead, published in 1995, held the No. 1 spot on the New York Times' bestseller list for seven weeks.

Gates has donated the proceeds of both books to non- profit organizations that support the use of
technology in education and skills development.


In addition to his love of computers and software, Gates founded Corbis, which is developing one of
the world's largest resources of visual information - a comprehensive digital archive of art and
photography from public and private collections around the globe. He is also a member of the board of directors of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., which invests in companies engaged in diverse business activities.







Top row: Steve Wood (left), Bob Wallace, Jim Lane. Middle row: Bob O'Rear, Bob Greenberg, Marc McDonald, Gordon Letwin. Bottom row: Bill Gates, Andrea Lewis, Marla Wood, Paul Allen. December 7,
1978.


Philanthropy is also important to Gates. He and his wife, Melinda, have endowed a foundation with more than $28.8 billion (as of January 2005) to support philanthropic initiatives in the areas of global health and learning, with the hope that in the 21st century, advances in these critical areas will be available for all people. The Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation has committed more than $3.6 billion to organizations working in global health; more than $2 billion to improve learning opportunities, including the Gates

Library Initiative to bring computers, Internet Access and training to public libraries in low-income communities in the United States and Canada; more than $477 million to community projects in the Pacific Northwest; and more than $488 million to special projects and annual giving campaigns.

Gates was married on Jan. 1, 1994, to Melinda French Gates. They have three children. Gates is an avid reader, and enjoys playing golf and bridge.