BILL GATES

Bill Gates

• William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate, investor, author, philanthropist, and humanitarian. He is best known as the principal founder of Microsoft Corporation. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, CEO and chief software architect, while also being the largest individual shareholder until May 2014.

Early life

• Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, on October 28, 1955. He is the son of William H. Gates Sr. (b. 1925) and Mary Maxwell Gates (1929–1994). His ancestry includes English, German, Irish, and Scots-Irish.His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way. Gates' maternal grandfather was J. W. Maxwell, a national bank president. Gates has one 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" because his father had the "II" suffix. The family lived in the Sand Point area of Seattle in a home that was once damaged by a rare tornado when Gates was seven years old. Early on in his life, Gates observed that his parents wanted him to pursue a law career. When Gates was young, his family regularly attended a church of the Congregational Christian Churches, a Protestant Reformed denomination.

• 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".

Microsoft

BASIC

• After Gates read the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, which demonstrated the Altair 8800, he contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform. 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 demo, 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, held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC. Paul Allen was hired into MITS, and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with Allen at MITS in Albuquerque in November 1975.

•  Allen named their partnership "Micro-Soft" (a combination of "microcomputer" and "software"), with their first office located in Albuquerque.Within a year, the hyphen was dropped, and on November 26, 1976, the trade name "Microsoft" was registered with the Office of the Secretary of the State of New Mexico.Gates never returned to Harvard to complete his studies.