Skinny, shy and awkward, teenaged Bill Gates seemed an unlikely successor to hisoverachieving parents. His father, powerfully built and 6'6'' tall, was aprominent Seattle attorney, and his mother served on charitable boards and ranthe 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 futurebillionaire who would reinvent American business. Born in 1955, Gates attendedpublic elementary school, and enrolled in the private Lakeside School at agetwelve.
The following year, Gates wrote his first computer program, at a timewhen 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 theschool--which coincidentally placed the two in the same classes as the prettiestgirls in school. Still in high school, Gates and Allen founded a company calledTraf-O-Data which analyzed city traffic data. Gates set off for HarvardUniversity 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 December1974, Allen, who was working at Honeywell outside of Boston, showed Gates aPopular 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 headof M.I.T.
S. and said they could provide a version of BASIC for the Altair. Aftera successful demonstration at the company's Albuquerque headquarters, M.I.T.S.
contracted with Gates and Allen for programming languages. The pair moved to NewMexico and started Micro-soft (they dropped the hypen later). Although thecompany's first five clients went bankrupt, the company struggled on, moving toSeattle in 1979. The following year, IBM asked Gates to provide an operatingsystem for its first personal computer. Gates purchased a system called QDOS(Quick and Dirty Operating System) for $50,000 from another company, changed thename to MS-DOS, and licensed it to IBM. The IBM PC took the market by storm whenit was introduced in 1981--and licensing fees streamed into Microsoft, ensuringthe company's survival over the next several years.
Microsoft continuedconcentrating on the software market, adding consumer applications likeMicrosoft Word. In 1986, when the company went public, Gates became a paperbillionaire at the age of thirty-one. The following year, the company introducedits 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 thefirst six weeks alone. Microsoft's software became so ubiquitous that the U.
S.Justice Department began a series of long-lasting antitrust investigationsagainst the company, bogging it down in protracted legal battles. In 1995, Gatesdramatically changed the direction of the entire company and focused on theInternet. While some of his efforts, including the much hyped Microsoft Networkand its highly touted Web "shows", fizzled, the company quickly gainedground on Netscape with its popular Internet Explorer browser. Meanwhile, Gatesbuilt a 40,000-square-foot technological showcase of a home on Lake Washington.Gates also got married on Jan.
1, 1994, to Melinda French Gates(a marketingexecutive at Microsoft). The couple had two children: a daughter, JenniferKatharine Gates, born in 1996; and a son, Rory John Gates, born in 1999. amarketing executive at Microsoft. They later had two kids: daughter Jenniferborn in 1996 and son Rory born in 1999. Bill and Melinda Gates have endowed afoundation with more than $17 billion to support philanthropic initiatives inthe areas of global health and learning, with the hope that as we move into the21st century, advances in these critical areas will be available for allpeople.
To date, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has committed more than$300 million to organizations working in global health; more than $300 millionto improve learning opportunities, including the Gates Library Initiative tobring computers, Internet Access and training to public libraries in low-incomecommunities in the United States and Canada; more than $54 million to communityprojects in the Pacific Northwest; and more than $29 million to special projectsand annual giving campaigns. In addition to his passion for computers, Gates isinterested in biotechnology. He sits on the board of the Icos Corporation and isa shareholder in Darwin Molecular, a subsidiary of British-based Chiroscience.He also founded Corbis Corporation, which is developing one of the largestresources of visual information in the world-a comprehensive digital archive ofart and photography from public and private collections around the globe.
Gatesalso has invested with cellular telephone pioneer Craig McCaw in Teledesic, acompany that is working on an ambitious plan to launch hundreds of low-orbitsatellites around the globe to provide worldwide two-way broadbandtelecommunications service.
