Bill Gates
Bill Gate is an Entrepreneur, Chairman of Microsoft, Co-chair of the Bill Gates Foundation. Gates also founded Corbis, a comprehensive digital archive of art and photography from public and private collections around the globe. He is a member of the board of directors of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. He is one of the richest men in the world.
He was born on October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington to William H. Gates Sr., an attorney and Mary Maxwell Gates, a School teacher.
Gates grew up in Seattle with his two sisters, Kristianne (elder) and Libby (younger). His father William H. Gates Sr. is a retired attorney and co-chair of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. His mother, Mary Gates was a school teacher, University of Washington regent, and chairwoman of United Way International.
Mary Gates served on several corporate boards, among them, First Interstate Bank in Seattle (founded by her grandfather), the United Way, and International Machines (IBM)
Bill Gates was a voracious reader as a child, spending many hours reading reference books such as encyclopedia.
Reports say that at the age of 11 or 12 Bill’s parents began to have concerns about his behavior. He was doing well in school, but he seemed bored and withdrawn at times.
At the age of thirteen he enrolled in Seattle’s Lakeside school, an exclusive preparatory school. He did well in all his subjects but excelled more in Math and Science, Drama and English. He also developed interest in computer programing at thirteen.
In 1970, at the age of fifteen, Bill Gates went into business with his childhood friend, Paul Allen who was Bill’s senior at the Lakeside School and as teenagers they developed Traf-o-Data a computer program that monitored traffic patterns in Seattle and netted $20,000 for their efforts.
He graduated from Lakeside in 1973 where he scored 1590 out of 1600 on the college SAT test.
In 1973 he got admission into Harvard where he met Steve Ballmer (Microsoft’s current CEO). During this time, Gates wrote a version of the programming language BASIC for MITS, Altair microcomputer.
In the summer of 1974, Gates joined Allen his friend, who had dropped out of Washington State University and moved to Boston, Massachusetts, to work for Honeywell.
Allen and Gates spent two months in 1974 writing software at the Harvard’s Computer lab for Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS). After they successfully ran the program, Allen was hired by MITS and Gates joined him.
In 1975, Gates left Harvard University in his junior year to focus on Microsoft which he founded with Paul Allen.
Microsoft wrote software in different formats for other companies and at the end of 1978, Gates moved the company’s operation to Bellevue Washington, just east of Seattle where they started with 25 employees with broad responsibilities for all aspects of the operation, product development, business development and marketing.
On November 10, 1983, at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, Microsoft Corporation formally announced Microsoft Windows, a next- generation operating system.
On January 1, 1994, Bill Gates married Melinda French Gates. They have three children.
Gates began his major philanthropic efforts in 1994 when he created the William H. Gates Foundation which focused on global health. In 1997 he and his wife Melinda created the Gates Library Foundation which worked to bring public access computers and internet connections to libraries in United States. It’s name changed to the Gates Learning Foundation in 1999. In 2000, the two foundations, William H. Gates and the Gates Learning Foundation merged into the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
In July 2008, he became the chairman of Microsoft and advisor on some key development projects
His Hobbies are: Athletes and Monopoly
Favorite quote by Bill Gates
"Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose."
References:
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/leadership/Pages/bill-gates.aspx
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/
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