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William Henry Gates III Kt (born October 28, 1955), commonly known as Bill Gates, is the co-founder and current Chairman and Chief Software Architect of Microsoft. According to Forbes magazine in 2004, Gates is the wealthiest person in the world, a position he has held steadily for many years.
Bill Gates was born in Seattle, Washington to William Henry Gates, Jr., a corporate lawyer, and Mary Maxwell, board member of First Interstate Bank, Pacific Northwest Bell and the national board of United Way. Gates went to Lakeside School, Seattle's most exclusive prep school, and later on went to study at Harvard University, but dropped out without graduating.
While he was a student at Harvard, he co-authored with Paul Allen the original Altair BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 (the first commercially successful personal computer) in the mid 1970s. It was inspired by BASIC, an easy-to-learn programming language developed at Dartmouth College for teaching purposes.
Gates married Melinda French on January 1, 1994. They have three children, Jennifer Katharine Gates (1996), Rory John Gates (1999) and Phoebe Adele Gates (2002). They live in a very large earth-sheltered home in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington. It is a very modern 21st century house in the "Pacific lodge" style, with advanced electrical and electronic systems everywhere. In one respect though it is more like an 18th or 19th century mansion: It has a large private library with a domed reading room.
Also in 1994, he acquired the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci; as of 2003 it was on display at the Seattle Art Museum.
In 1975, Gates and Allen co-founded Microsoft Corporation to market their version of BASIC, called Microsoft BASIC. It was the primary interpreted computer language of the MS-DOS operating system, and was key to Microsoft's early commercial success.
Microsoft BASIC evolved into Microsoft QuickBasic and QBasic, Visual Basic, and later still, Visual Basic .NET.
In February 1976, Gates wrote the Open Letter to Hobbyists, which shocked the computer hobbyist community by asserting that a commercial market existed for computer software. Gates stated in the letter that software should not be copied without the publisher's permission, which he equated to piracy. While legally correct, Gates's proposal was unprecedented in a community that was influenced by its ham radio legacy and hacker ethic, in which innovations and knowledge were freely shared in the community. Nevertheless, Gates was right about the market prospects and his efforts paid off: Microsoft Corporation became one of the world's most successful commercial enterprises, and a key player in the creation of a retail software industry.
Microsoft's key moment came when in the late 1970s, IBM was planning to enter the personal computer market with its IBM Personal Computer (PC), which was released in 1981. IBM arranged for Microsoft to produce the computer's BASIC interpreter, and Gates recommended Digital Research, Inc. to produce the operating system. IBM representatives perceived DRI as unenthusiastic about producing the operating system, and they turned again to Microsoft. Without revealing IBM's involvement (which would have violated a confidentiality agreement), Microsoft representatives approached Seattle Computer Products, which had developed an operating system for the Intel x86 microprocessor that the IBM PC would use. Microsoft agreed to become the sales agent for SCP's operating system, later purchasing it for a reported sum of $50,000. Microsoft subsequently licensed the operating system for a one-time fee to IBM (which released it under the PC-DOS name) and worked with computer manufacturers to include its own version, called MS-DOS, with every computer system sold. At a later point in time, IBM tried to steer users to its own operating system called OS/2, but it was too late. Too many third party programs already ran on MS-DOS.
During the following years, Gates used his growing power to crush competitors such as Wordperfect, Lotus 123 and Netscape, among many others. It is said, for example, that Gates instructed Microsoft programmers to include special code in one of the MS-DOS versions to make Lotus 123 produce errors, to make it appear to the users as if Lotus was the problem. Some years later, being unable to convince users to use Internet Explorer instead of the then leading Netscape, Microsoft removed most of Netscape's source of revenue by giving Internet Explorer for free (including it with the Windows operating system).
Spectacularly successful, this deal was challenged in court by SCP on the grounds that Microsoft had concealed its relationship with IBM in order to purchase the operating system cheaply; subsequently, there was a settlement, but no admission of duplicity or guilt. Gates' reputation was further sullied by a series of major antitrust actions brought both by the U.S. Department of Justice and individual companies against Microsoft in the late 1990s.
As the architect of Microsoft's product strategy, Gates has aggressively broadened the company's range of products and, once it has obtained a leading position in a category, has vigorously defended that position. His and other Microsoft executives' strategic decisions have more than once drawn the concern of competition regulators, and in some cases have been ruled illegal.
In 2000, Gates promoted long-time friend and Microsoft executive Steve Ballmer to the role of Chief Executive Officer and took on the role of "Chief Software Architect".
In the mid-1980s Gates became excited about the possibilities of compact disc for storage, and sponsored the publication of the book CD-ROM.
With his wife, Gates founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a charitable organization. Critics have called this a response to negative public outcry over the seemingly monopolistic and anti-competitive practices of his company, but those close to Gates say that he had long expressed his plan to eventually give away most (in 1997 the Washington Post reported 90%) of his large fortune. The foundation's grants have provided funds for underrepresented minority college scholarships, AIDS prevention, diseases that strike mainly in the third world, and other causes. In June 1999, Gates and his wife donated US$5 billion to their foundation, the largest single donation ever by living individuals.
According to Forbes list of the World's Wealthiest People : (figures in US Dollars)
Several films and television shows have portrayed fictionalized versions of Bill Gates. Among them:
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