On October 28, 1955, Bill Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, the son of a lawyer and a teacher, and he was sent to a private school where the pupils had access to a computer terminal at a time when such machines were rare. He learned to program there, and he met Paul Allen, who was two years older, and the two worked on software together as teenagers. He scored very high in tests. He went to Harvard in 1973 and left after two years. He left early.
The company was founded in 1975, after the two read about a small computer on the cover of a magazine and wrote a version of the BASIC language for it, and they moved to New Mexico to be near the maker. The turning point came in 1980 and 1981, when IBM asked the firm to supply an operating system for its new personal computer, and Microsoft bought a system from another company, adapted it and licensed it to IBM while keeping the right to sell it to other makers. That decision made the company the standard in the industry.
He ran Microsoft as chief executive until 2000 and stayed as chairman, and the firm grew into one of the largest in the world on the strength of its operating systems and office software, and it was the subject of a long antitrust case in the United States in the 1990s. He was for many years the richest person in the world by the published lists, and he was known for a competitive and combative style in business. The firm grew fast.
He gave up the day to day running of the company and from 2000 worked through the foundation he and his wife had set up, which spends on health in poor countries and on education in the United States, and he and others pledged to give away most of their wealth, and the foundation has paid out tens of billions of dollars. The money went out. He left the Microsoft board in 2020. He has written books on technology and on climate.