William Henry Gates III

William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington ) is the co-founder, chairman, former chief software architect, and former CEO of Microsoft. He is also the founder of Corbis, a digital image archiving company. He was the second child and only son of William Henry Gates Jr., a successful Seattle attorney, and Mary Maxwell, a former schoolteacher. Kristi is his older sister and is his tax accountant, and Libby, his younger sister, lives in Seattle.

Gates attended Lakeside School, Seattle's most exclusive prep school, where he was able to develop his programming skills on the school's minicomputer.

At the age of fourteen Bill Gates and his programming buddy thought up the idea for a traffic counting computer which would later be named 'Traf- o-Data' and earn them 20,000 dollars. But when word got around that the computers were being sold out of a basement by a couple of teens the business fell through. Bill Gates entered the University of Harvard as a freshman When at Harvard Bill made the programming language for the first microcomputer. When Bill Gates was a junior, he dropped out of Harvard University to work on Microsoft, a company he had begun in 1975 with the help of Paul Allen. Bill Gates believed that computers were the thing of the future and everyone will need one in an office, house, and schools. So they had began making the software for personal computers.

In the late 1970s, IBM was planning to enter the personal computer market with its IBM Personal Computer (PC). IBM needed an operating system for its new computer, which was based on the newly developed Intel x86 processor family. Bill Gates did not take up the grueling task of developing the operating system. Instead he approached a company called Seattle Computer who had developed the operating system. Without revealing the IBM connection Bill Gates purchased the operating system on behalf of Microsoft. Microsoft managed to purchase the operating system from Seattle Computer at a dirt cheap rate of $50,000. Microsoft subsequently