Early Life

Bill Gates was born in Seattle, Washington in the United States of America in 1955. His father was a lawyer and he had two sisters. Bill's parents had a career in law in mind for Gates. Gates went to school at Lakeside school when he was 13. Lakeside school is a private prepatory school and this is where Gates first got his hands on a computer and began programming. He got a block of time on the General Electric computer at school and began programming in BASIC, his first program was an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play against the computer. Gates was fascinated by computers and this is when he realized his passion for software. Information Sciences inc. hired Gates and three others to write a payroll program in Cobol. Gates also wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. He deliberately put himself in classes with 'interesting girls'. Gates scored a 1590 out of 1600 on the SATs and enrolled at Harvard College in 1973. He studied pre-law but also took courses in advanced mathematics and computer science. While there, he met Steve Ballmer who would eventually succeed Bill as CEO of Microsoft. Gates dropped out of Harvard in 1974 to start a software business with Paul Allen.

Career/Microsoft

In 1975, Gates contacted MITS, the creator of the new microcomputer that they were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform when in reality they didn't have an Altair and weren't working on an interpreter. A demo for Gates to show off the interpreter was organized and in just a few weeks, Gates and Allen had written the interpreter after developing an Altair emulator. The interpreter was successful and Gates and Allen went to work at MITS in alberquerque. Gates and Allen formed a partnership named 'Micro-soft' and in 1976, they became independent of MITS and had become Microsoft. They wrote various programming language software for different systems. The company moved to Washington in 1979. IBM contacted Microsoft in 1980 and proposed that Microsoft write them a BASIC interpreter. IBM also needed an operating system. Gates adapted 86-DOS for PC and delivered it to IBM as PC DOS in exchange for a one-time fee of $50,000. Microsoft released its first retail version of Microsoft Windows in 1985 and Microsoft struck a deal with IBM to develop an operating system known as OS/2. Ths was the beginning of the most popular personal computer operating system ever. Gates main role in Microsoft was managing and executive, however he also played a large role in software development part

Philantropy/Charity

Gates left Microsoft to do philantropy work in 2006. Gates was the highest earning billionaire in 2013 with US$78.5 billion. In 2000, Bill and Melinda Gates combined three family foundations to create the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It's the worlds wealthiest charitable foundation with $34.6 Billion. Gates has credited David Rockefeller as a major influence to his charitable acts. As of 2007, Bill and Melinda Gates were the second-most generous philantropists in America, having given over $28 Billion to charity. They both plan to eventually donate 95 percent of their wealth to charity. The foundation supports genetically modified organisms in agricultural development. In developing countries, they focus on improving people's health and giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty (according to the foundation page - click here for more). In 2010, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg (facebook founder and CEO) signed a committment called the Gates-Buffett Giving Pledge which is a committment by all three to donate at least half of their wealth over the course of time to charity.

Current

Currently, Bill Gates is spending most of his time and money on charitable work such as his work for the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. In 2016, President Barack Obama honoured Bill Gates for his philanthropic efforts with the presidential medal of freedom.

Timeline

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