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Bill Gates
Born October 28, 1955 · Seattle, Washington · Co-Founder of Microsoft
William Henry Gates III taught himself to program on a time-sharing terminal at age thirteen, and within two years he had exhausted the computer time his school could offer him. He dropped out of Harvard at nineteen to pursue a vision that most people in 1975 considered absurd: that personal computers would one day sit on every office desk and in every home. He was right — and in being right, he built the most valuable software company in history and became, for many years, the wealthiest person on earth. Then, at the peak of his fortune, he turned his formidable analytical mind toward a new problem: the preventable deaths of millions of people in the developing world.
Gates was born in Seattle, Washington on October 28, 1955, into a prosperous family — his father was a prominent attorney and his mother sat on the boards of major corporations. The family enrolled him in Lakeside School, an elite private institution that happened to acquire a Teletype terminal connected to a General Electric computer in 1968 — one of the first schools in the country to have such a thing. Gates was instantly obsessed. He and his friend Paul Allen spent every free hour on the machine, eventually exhausting their allocated computer time and breaking into university accounts to get more.
At Harvard, Gates was a brilliant if erratic student who preferred poker and programming to coursework. When Allen showed him a Popular Electronics cover story in January 1975 announcing the Altair 8800 — the first commercially available personal computer kit — Gates called the manufacturer, claimed he and Allen had already written a BASIC interpreter for it (they hadn't), and offered to demonstrate it. In eight weeks, working furiously, they wrote an interpreter from scratch. It worked. Gates dropped out of Harvard and moved to Albuquerque. Microsoft was born.
The company's early years were spent writing programming language interpreters for the fragmented ecosystem of early personal computers. But the transformative moment came in 1980, when IBM approached Microsoft to provide an operating system for its forthcoming personal computer. Gates and Allen did not have one — but they knew who did. They acquired a system called QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from a small Seattle company for $50,000, licensed it to IBM as MS-DOS, and — crucially — retained the rights to license it to other manufacturers as well. When the IBM PC became the standard for business computing and a flood of IBM-compatible clones followed, every one of them needed MS-DOS. Microsoft had inserted itself into the mandatory infrastructure of an industry.
Gates had read the landscape with extraordinary clarity. He understood that in personal computing, software would matter more than hardware — that the machine was just the delivery vehicle for the programs, and whoever controlled the programs would control the industry. He drove Microsoft with relentless, sometimes brutal intensity. He read every line of code the company produced in its early years. He was famous for confrontational management — demanding that employees justify their decisions in grueling technical arguments he often won. He was also famous for sleeping on office floors and working through weekends, setting an example his team could not ignore.
"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning."
Windows — a graphical operating system built on top of DOS — launched in 1985 and became the dominant computing interface on earth. By the mid-1990s, Microsoft's Windows and Office products ran on more than 90% of the world's personal computers. The company's market dominance drew a landmark antitrust case from the U.S. Department of Justice in 1998, which found that Microsoft had illegally maintained its monopoly through anticompetitive practices. Gates stepped down as CEO in 2000, transitioning to chief software architect and then, in 2008, to full-time philanthropy.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, launched in 2000, became the largest private charitable foundation in history. Gates applied the same systems-thinking and data-driven intensity he had brought to software to the problems of global health, agricultural development, and education. The foundation's investments have helped eradicate polio from all but a handful of countries, reduce childhood mortality from malaria, and develop new vaccines for diseases that primarily afflict the world's poorest people. It is, by any measure, the most ambitious and consequential act of private philanthropy in human history.
Born in Seattle, Washington on October 28.
Discovers programming at age 13 on Lakeside School's time-sharing terminal.
Drops out of Harvard; co-founds Microsoft with Paul Allen in Albuquerque.
Licenses MS-DOS to IBM — the deal that makes Microsoft indispensable to the PC industry.
Launches Windows 1.0; begins building what will become the world's dominant OS.
Steps down as CEO; launches the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with $28 billion.
Gates made the personal computer a mass-market reality. His insistence that software — not hardware — was the core value of the computing industry shaped the entire structure of the technology business. Windows and Office defined how billions of people worked for three decades. Then, having accumulated more wealth than almost any individual in history, he devoted it to fighting the diseases and inequities that kill the world's poorest people. His second act is arguably more important than his first — a case study in how extraordinary resources, directed with analytical rigor toward the world's hardest problems, can save millions of lives.