Bill Gates

William Henry Gates III or Bill Gates was born on 28th October, 1955 at Seattle, Washington is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur and cofounder of Microsoft Corporation, the world’s largest software company. His father was William Henry Gates II or Bill Gates Sr. who was an American attorney and philanthropist and his mother was Mary Maxwell who worked as an executive at a major bank. Bill Gates belonged to a middle-class family with his older sister Kristianne and a younger sister called Libby.

At the age of thirteen, Bill wrote the first computer program. He helped a group of programmers to computerize their school’s payroll system and founded Traf-O-Data, a company that sold traffic-counting systems to local governments. During his school days at Lakeside high school, Bill Gates met Paul Allen who was his senior. They became best friends and their started bonding over the common interest – computer programming. The duo adapted BASIC - a popular programming language used on large computers, for use on microcomputers. With the success of this project, Gates left Harvard and founded Microsoft Corporation along with his friend Paul G. Allen in the year 1975. Bill Gates served as its CEO for the next 25 years and also became president and chairman of the board when the Microsoft was incorporated in 1981. Microsoft licensed an operating system called MS-DOS to IBM Corporation—then the world’s biggest computer supplier and industry trendsetter—for use on its first microcomputer, the IBM PC. After the machine’s release in 1981, IBM quickly set the technical standard for the PC industry, and MS-DOS likewise pushed out other competing operating systems.

Apart from his work at Microsoft, Bill Gates is also known for his charitable work. With his then wife, Melinda, he launched the William H. Gates Foundation (in 1999, this was renamed as Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) in 1994 to fund global health programs as well as projects in the Pacific Northwest. During the fag end of 20th century, the Gates couple also funded North American libraries through the Gates Library Foundation (which was later renamed as Gates Learning Foundation in 1999) and collected funds for minority study grants through the Gates Millennium Scholars program. Bill Gates stepped down as chairman in February 2014, but continued to serve as a board member in the Microsoft Corporation until 2020. During his career at Microsoft Corporation, Gates was able to hold the position of chairman, Chief executive officer, president, chief software architect, and also was the largest individual shareholder of the company until May 2014.