Skinny, shy and awkward, teenaged Bill Gates seemed an unlikely successor to his
overachieving parents. His father, powerfully built and 6'6'' tall, was a
prominent Seattle attorney, and his mother served on charitable boards and ran
the 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 future
billionaire who would reinvent American business. Born in 1955, Gates attended
public elementary school, and enrolled in the private Lakeside School at age
twelve. The following year, Gates wrote his first computer program, at a time
when 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 the
school--which coincidentally placed the two in the same classes as the prettiest
girls in school. Still in high school, Gates and Allen founded a company called
Traf-O-Data which analyzed city traffic data. Gates set off for Harvard
University 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 December
1974, Allen, who was working at Honeywell outside of Boston, showed Gates a
Popular 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 head
of M.I.T.S. and said they could provide a version of BASIC for the Altair. After
a successful demonstration at the company's Albuquerque headquarters, M.I.T.S.
contracted with Gates and Allen for programming languages. The pair moved to New
Mexico and started Micro-soft (they dropped the hypen later). Although the
company's first five clients went bankrupt, the company struggled on, moving to
Seattle in 1979. The following year, IBM asked Gates to provide an operating
system for its first personal computer. Gates purchased a system called QDOS
(Quick and Dirty Operating System) for $50,000 from another company, changed the
name to MS-DOS, and licensed it to IBM. The IBM PC took the market by storm when
it was introduced in 1981--and licensing fees streamed into Microsoft, ensuring
the company's survival over the next several years. Microsoft continued
concentrating on the software market, adding consumer applications like
Microsoft Word. In 1986, when the company went public, Gates became a paper
billionaire at the age of thirty-one. The following year, the company introduced
its 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 the
first six weeks alone. Microsoft's software became so ubiquitous that the U.S.
Justice Department began a series of long-lasting antitrust investigations
against the company, bogging it down in protracted legal battles. In 1995, Gates
dramatically changed the direction of the entire company and focused on the
Internet. While some of his efforts, including the much hyped Microsoft Network
and its highly touted Web "shows", fizzled, the company quickly gained
ground on Netscape with its popular Internet Explorer browser. Meanwhile, Gates
built 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 marketing
executive at Microsoft). The couple had two children: a daughter, Jennifer
Katharine Gates, born in 1996; and a son, Rory John Gates, born in 1999. a
marketing executive at Microsoft. They later had two kids: daughter Jennifer
born in 1996 and son Rory born in 1999. Bill and Melinda Gates have endowed a
foundation with more than $17 billion to support philanthropic initiatives in
the areas of global health and learning, with the hope that as we move into the
21st century, advances in these critical areas will be available for all
people.To date, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has committed more than
$300 million to organizations working in global health; more than $300 million
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 $54 million to community
projects in the Pacific Northwest; and more than $29 million to special projects
and annual giving campaigns. In addition to his passion for computers, Gates is
interested in biotechnology. He sits on the board of the Icos Corporation and is
a shareholder in Darwin Molecular, a subsidiary of British-based Chiroscience.
He also founded Corbis Corporation, which is developing one of the largest
resources of visual information in the world-a comprehensive digital archive of
art and photography from public and private collections around the globe. Gates
also has invested with cellular telephone pioneer Craig McCaw in Teledesic, a
company that is working on an ambitious plan to launch hundreds of low-orbit
satellites around the globe to provide worldwide two-way broadband
telecommunications service.