The chairman and cheif executive officer of Microsoft Corporation, the world`s leading software firm.....

William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle, Washington on October 28th, 1955. Bills father Bill Gates Jr. worked for a Seattle law firm and Bills mother Mary, taught school until they started their family. Bills parents were married in 1951 and two years later they got their first child, Bills older sister, Kristanne. Two years later Bill was born and in 1964 third and final Gates was born, her name is Libby. As a child Bill enjoyed rocking back and forth, today he still has a habit of rocking when he is thinking abouth something. Bill was very bored at school and his parents knew it so they were always trying to feed him more information to keep him busy. Bills parents finnaly decided to put him in a privte school where he would be challenged more. The Lakeside private school had just bought a new computer when Bill arrived and he was immediantly hooked. Within a week he had surpassed the knowledge of the computer teacher at Lakeside. Learning the BASIC programming language was a breeze for Bill and he was soon writhing his own programs.

He wrote his first computer program when he was 13 years old. It was a program to play farmerchess on. The computer he used was big, heavy, slow and and he was totally obsessed. The computer did not have a screen, so they made theire move, and they ran over to a big printer and looked at the score or who had won. If they did it on paper each move would take abouth 30 sec.but on the computer it took almost all the eating time.

He got an arrangement with the owners that he would get free comeputer-time if he found things that would make the coputer crach. During this time Bill met Paul Allen his business partner for the rest of his life. Together they started a small company called Traf-o-Data, they sold a small computer outfitted with their program that could count traffic for the city. This company wasn`t a big success but it did earn the two boys some money as well as good business skills. Bill also wrote a schedule program for his school which he modified a bit to put a littøe Bill Gates in a class of prettiest girls in the school. Bill was deemed by his peers and his teachers as the smartest kid on campus. Upon graduating from Lakeside Bill enrolled Harvard University in 1973, one of the best universities in the country. Bill was also bored here so he spent most time programming, playing poker and seeing how little work he could do and still get the best mark.

He told his teachers that he would be a millionari by the time he was 30, this was one of the few times he understimated himself, Bill was a billionaire when he was 31. One of Bills teachers was quoted saying "He was a helluva good programmer, but he`s an obnoxious human being". The intense lifestyle Bill lived during his first year in Harvard made him ill for most of the summer of 1974. Bill soon left Harvard for business opportunities in programming which turnd him into a multi-billionaire. Later he met Melinda French who he married and they now have a little daughter named Jennifer. It`s very interesting that even whit all that money Bill drives himself to work in an averange family car and he even flies coach.

After Harvard Bill and his homeboy Allen moved to Albuquerque, where they established a partnership called Microsoft to produce their BASIC program for MITS. MITS foled shortly after that, but Microsoft had by that time, begun selling its programs to other fledgling hardware companies such as Apple and Commodore. Within eighteen months of moving to Albuquerque, Gates and Allen had earning of a few hundred thousend dollars, and they struck paydirt in 1977, when the Tandy Coporation hired Microsoft to developsoftware for its popular Radio Shack computers. In January 1979 Gates and Allen shifted Microsoft`s headquaters from Albuquerque to Bellevue, Washington, near Seattle. Microsoft moved to the forefont of the burgeoning microcomputer industry in 1980, when IBM, one of the world`s largest Manufactureers of electronic and electronic office machines, contacted Gates about devising an operation system for the personal computer it was then planning. Uncertain wheater his young company, it returned to gates, how paid $50,000 to a Seattle programmer called Tim Paterson for the rights to a rubimentary system called Q-DOS, for "guick and dirty operating system". Gates modified Paterson`s program, added some new features, and renaming it Microsoft Disk Operative System, or MS-DOS, he sold it to IBM.

Gates then persuaded IBM to give up its secret design spesifications in favor of an open system for its personal computer, thereby allowing other software makers to build sotware for it more easily, since they would know how the operating system functioned. About 100 companies, eager to be IBM-compatible, obtanined licenses for MS-DOS quickly making it major operating system for personal coputers.