Bill Gates who appears in the Forbes magazine of the world’s top 5 richest people is an American philanthropist, programmer, investor and entrepreneur. He and Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft, the number one software company in the world. The revenue of Microsoft rose to $110.4 in the year 2015 and now Bill Gates is ranked as the second richest person in the world after Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos. Gates was Microsoft’s CEO until January 2000 when he stepped down. He however remains the technology advisor to the current CEO, Satya Nadella. Bill Gates is now more focused with the going on of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
His early life
Bill Gates was born in Seattle, Washington State on 28th of October 1955. His father is known as William H. Gates Sr and his mother’s name is Mary Maxwell Gates. He has other two siblings, his elder sister named Kristi Gates and younger sister called Libby Gates.
Image Credit: express.co.uk
At 13 years of age, he was enrolled at a private preparatory school called Lakeside School. While attending the school, he took a deep interest at programming and he was excused from classes to find some time to pursue his interests.
Bill Gates built the first computer program on a General Electric Machine. He would later meet Paul Allen in the school and they then worked together to find bugs in the PDP-10 system that belonged to the Computer Center Corporation. Gates went ahead to make headway in computer technology that was still in a pioneering stage at the time. He together with Paul Allen and other students managed to write a payroll program for Information Sciences to get an exchange of computer time and royalties. His computer and programming skills became evident to his school’s administration he even created a program that scheduled students in classes.
After Bill Gates had successfully graduated from the Lakeside School, he enrolled at the Harvard University in 1973, one of the best universities in the US. Gates wasn’t sure of what he could study at the university, so he enrolled his name for pre-law. He’d later find that his real interest was actually in programming and he really struggled to pay attention to law classes.
Bill Gates ultimately dropped out of Harvard barely a year after enrolling there to pursue his interest in computers and programming with his longtime friend Paul Allen.
Image Credit: The Cheat Sheet
The formation of Microsoft
Bill Gates and his close buddy Allen created a company of their own and named it, Traf-O-Data. They later developed minicomputer to help them measure traffic flow, this project alone earned them around $20,000 at the time. Traf-O-Data came to an end when Bill Gates left college.
Bill Gates and his friend Paul Allen then later form Microsoft on a vision “a computer on every desk and Microsoft software on every computer.” The company has grown to become one of the leading software companies on the planet.
Philanthropy
Bill Gates is not a mean person and his generosity is evident in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a philanthropist organization that strives to help the needy in society.
He has also donated considerable sums of his money to a number of philanthropist projects in the US and around the world.
Leave a Reply