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.
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.
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