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Born
Born to Attorney William Gates II and Mary Gates, a school teacher in Seattle, Washington. His family was upper middle class, and wanted Bill to follow a career in law. -
Bill Attends Lakeside School
At 13 he enrolled in the Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school. When Gates was in the eighth grade, he took an interest in programming. He wrote his first computer program on this machine: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly. When he reflected back on that moment, he commented on it and said, "There was just something neat about the machine" -
Bill Gates Enrolls at Harvard
Bill Gates scored a 1590 out a 1600 on his SAT's and subsequently enrolled at Harvard in the fall of 1973. While at Harvard he meets his future business partner Steve Ballmer. He entered as a pre-law major but soon shifts focus to the University's most rigorous mathametics and graduate level computer science courses. By his junior year he dropped out to start Microsoft Corporation -
Bill Gates and Paul Allen Form Partnership Called Microsoft
Microsoft was formed soon after the introduction of the Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) Altair, the first "personal computer," a build-it-yourself kit for hobbyists. Bill Gates and Paul Allen seized the opportunity to transform this early PC into a breakthrough -- the Altair needed software, a programming language that could make it perform useful computing tasks. That's when it all began. -
Microsoft Opens First International Office in Japan
The Microsoft name was registered with the secretary of state of New Mexico on November 26, 1976. Microsoft’s first international office was in Japan and found it on November 1, 1978. The name of the international office was ASCII, which is now known as Microsoft Japan. -
Microsoft Becomes Incorporated
Microsoft launched its first retail version of Microsoft Windows on November 20, 1985, and in August, the company struck a deal with IBM to develop a separate operating system called OS/2. Which subsequently made BIll Gates President of Microsoft and chariman of the Board -
Bill Gates Founds Corbis
Corbis Corporation is an American company, based in Seattle, Washington, that sells and otherwise distributes photography and film footage and related rights.One reason for starting the company was Gates's belief that people would someday decorate their homes with a revolving display of digital artwork using digital frames. -
Bill Gates Marries French
Married on January 1st, 1994, they now have three children and live in a beautiful home overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington. Melinda is the co-founder and co-chair of the BIll and Melinda Gates Foundation and a former unit manager for several Microsoft products. -
United States v. Microsoft Trial
United States v. Microsoft was a set of consolidated civil actions filed against Microsoft Corporation pursuant to the Sherman Antitrust Act on May 18, 1998 by the United States Department of Justice and 20 U.S. states. But in the end, a federal judge approved the company's anti-trust settlement with the Justice of Department and rejected virtually all of the stiffer sanctions sought by a coalition of state attorney general. The ruling bought at least a temporary close to the landmark case. -
Bill Gates Steps Down From Daily Duties
Bill Gates stepped down as chief executive officer of Microsoft in January, 2000. He remained as chairman and created the position of chief software architect. In June, 2006, Gates announced that he would be transitioning from full-time work at Microsoft to part-time work and full-time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
