Bill Gates

Bill Gates, born in 1955, American business executive, who serves as chairman of Microsoft Corporation, the leading computer software company in the United States. Gates cofounded Microsoft in 1975 with high school friend Paul Allen. The company’s success made Gates one of the most influential figures in the computer industry and, eventually, one of the richest people in the world.


Born in Seattle, Washington, William Henry Gates III attended public school through the sixth grade. In the seventh grade he entered Seattle’s exclusive Lakeside School, where he met Allen. Gates was first introduced to computers and programming languages in 1968, when he was in the eighth grade. That year Lakeside bought a teletype machine that connected to a mainframe computer over phone lines. At the time, the school was one of the few that provided students with access to a computer.

Soon afterward, Gates, Allen, and other students convinced a local computer company to give them free access to its PDP-10, a new minicomputer made by Digital Equipment Corporation. In exchange for the computer time, the students tried to find flaws in the system. Gates spent much of his free time on the PDP-10 learning programming languages such as BASIC, Fortran, and LISP. In 1972 Gates and Allen founded Traf-O-Data, a company that designed and built computerized car-counting machines for traffic analysis. The project introduced them to the programmable 8008 microprocessor from Intel Corporation.

While attending Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1975, Gates teamed with Allen to develop a version of the BASIC programming language for the Altair 8800, the first personal computer. They licensed the software to the manufacturer of the Altair, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), and formed Microsoft (originally Micro-soft) to develop versions of BASIC for other computer companies. Gates decided to drop out of Harvard in his junior year to devote his time to Microsoft. In 1980 Microsoft closed a pivotal deal with International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) to provide the operating system for the IBM PC personal computer. As part of the deal, Microsoft retained the right to license the operating system to other companies.

The success of the IBM PC made the operating system, MS-DOS, an industry standard. Microsoft’s revenues skyrocketed as other computer makers licensed MS-DOS and demand for personal computers surged. In 1986 Microsoft offered its stock to the public; by 1987 rapid appreciation of the stock had made Gates, 31, the youngest ever self-made billionaire. In the 1990s, as Microsoft’s Windows operating system and Office application software achieved worldwide market dominance, Gates amassed a fortune worth tens of billions of dollars. Alongside his successes, however, Gates was accused of using his company’s power to stifle competition. In 2000 a federal judge found Microsoft guilty of violating antitrust laws and ordered it split into two companies. An appeals court overturned the breakup order in 2001 but upheld the judge's ruling that Microsoft had abused its power to protect its Windows monopoly. In November 2001 Microsoft reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department and nine states, and a year later, the settlement was upheld by a federal district court judge. (For more information on the history of Microsoft, see Microsoft Corporation.)

Gates has made personal investments in other high-technology companies. He sits on the board of one biotechnology company and has invested in a number of others. In 1989 he founded Corbis Corporation, which now owns the largest collection of digital images in the world.

In the late 1990s Gates became more involved in philanthropy. With his wife he established the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which, ranked by assets, quickly became the largest foundation in the world. Gates has also authored two books: The Road Ahead (1995; revised, 1996), which details his vision of technology’s role in society, and Business @ the Speed of Thought (1999), which discusses the role technology can play in running a business.

In 1998 Gates appointed an executive vice president of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, to the position of president, but Gates continued to serve as Microsoft’s chairman and chief executive officer (CEO). In 2000 Gates transferred the title of CEO to Ballmer. While remaining chairman, Gates also took on the title of chief software architect to focus on the development of new products and technologies.

In June 2006 Gates announced that he would begin transitioning from a full-time role at Microsoft to a full-time role at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He relinquished his title of chief software architect to Ray Ozzie, a veteran leader in computer technology and creator of Lotus Notes. Gates planned to remain chairman of Microsoft and to continue as its largest shareholder, but he said that by July 2008 he would have only a part-time role at the company he cofounded.

Taken from :
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.