|
Microsoft co-founder William (Bill) H. became the richest man in the world ($40.7 billion) by marketing software that revolutionized information processing. He has also given more money to charity than anyone else in history.
Born on Oct. 28, 1955, William (Bill) Gates grew up in Seattle with his two sisters Kristi and Libby. His great-grandfather, J.W. Maxwell was a state legislator and his grandfather was vice president of a national bank. His father William Henry Gates, Jr., was a prominent corporate lawyer and his mother; the late Mary (Maxwell) Gates was a schoolteacher, University of Washington regent, and chairwoman of United Way International.
In elementary school, Gates was in a class of his own intellectually, although his marks did not always show it. His parents decided to enroll him in Seattle’s most exclusive prep school, Lakeside, which was known for its intense academic environment. It was at Lakeside where Gates was first introduced to a computer, and where he met Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen.
In the fall of 1968, when Computer Center Corporation (CCC) opened for business in Seattle, a deal was struck with Lakeside that gave students computer time. Gates and his friends spent all their time in the computer room and formed the Lakeside Programming Group (LPG).
In 1970, LPG was hired by Information Sciences Inc. (ISI) to program a payroll in exchange for more computer time and a percentage of profits. Gates and Allen next created Traf-O-Data, a computer program that measured traffic flow in a city – their first moneymaking project. Defense contractor TRW also recognized the pair’s talent and hired Gates and Allen to fix bugs in their computer systems - they were now becoming serious programmers.
Gates attended Harvard in 1973 but remained in close contact with Allen, and when Allen spotted a photo of the Altair 8080 on the cover of a Popular Mechanics magazine with the caption "World's First Microcomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models,” he suggested to Gates that the pair develop software for the new machine.
Gates contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the makers of the Altair, and told them he and Allen had developed a BASIC that could be used on the Altair. In reality, the pair hadn’t written a line of code for the Altair, but within eight weeks they had developed a prototype and struck a deal with MITS to buy the rights to their BASIC. Gates dropped out of Harvard within the year and Microsoft was formed.
Microsoft’s first big break came in the late 1970s, when IBM was searching for an operating system for their new IBM PC. Microsoft bought an x86 operating system from Seattle Computer for $50,000 and subsequently licensed it to IBM, who released it as PC-DOS on their IBM PCs. The PCs were a huge hit, and Microsoft had its first runaway success. Their next big success came in 1990, when, in response to Apple’s graphical user interface, they released Microsoft Windows 3.0.
Always seeming to be in the right place at the right time, in 1996 Microsoft licensed a World Wide Web browser named Internet Explorer 1.0 from a company called Spyglass. With the clout of Microsoft behind it, Internet Explorer soon overtook Netscape as the most installed Web browser on the planet.
Gates' reputation was hurt by a series of major antitrust actions brought against Microsoft by the U.S. Department of Justice and individual companies in the late 1990s, but his company weathered the storm, and remains the undisputed worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. In the fiscal year ending in June 2003 the company had $32.19 billion in revenues, employing 54,000 of the brightest people in the world in 85 countries.
In January of 1994, Bill Gates married Melinda French. The couple has three children, Jennifer Katharine Gates (1996), Rory John Gates (1999) and Phoebe Adele Gates (2002). They created the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in January 2000.
Led by Bill Gates’ father and Patty Stonesifer, the Seattle-based foundation has an endowment of approximately $25 billion and is building upon the unprecedented opportunities of the 21st century to improve equity in global health and learning.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is providing badly needed funds for underrepresented minority college scholarships, AIDS prevention, and many other causes that are often ignored by the charitable community, such as diseases that strike mainly in the third world. The Foundation has given out over $6.2 billion in grants since its inception, including over $1.2 billion dollars in 2002.
For more information about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation please visit:
http://www.gatesfoundation.org
For more information about Microsoft Corp. please visit:
http://www.microsoft.com
Send
This Page to a Friend
For more information:
For specific project examples and demonstrations,
or more information on interactive displays, digital messaging
systems and integrated donor wall projects, please contact:
PlannedLegacy
Suite 220 - 309 McDermot Avenue
Winnipeg, MB. Canada R3A 1T3
Phone: (204) 943-3923
Fax: (204) 943-4197
Toll Free: 1 (866) 882-3580
E-Mail: solutions@plannedlegacy.com
Web: www.plannedlegacy.com |
