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Gates met his Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen at Lakeside, where Allen was two years ahead (Isaacson 317).
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This is where Gates was introduced to computers through a time-sharing computer terminal hooked up to a GE Mark-II (Isaacson 316).
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This group was made up of Gates, Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans (Isaacson 318).
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This is where Gates met future Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (Isaacson 331) and began working on a brand for his and Allen's partnership.
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Gates and Allen decided to write an interpreter for BASIC that would run on the Altair's Intel 8080 microprocessor. This would allow people to create their own programs on the Altair (Isaacson 332).
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After formalizing a deal with MITS to supply BASIC for the Altair, Gates and Allen needed a name for their company. At first they went with Micro-Soft, a mix of "micro-computer" and "software" (Isaacson 337). The hyphen was dropped within a year.
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Homebrew Club member Dan Sokol made copies of Gates' and Allen's code and distributed it among Homebrew members. This started the spread of Microsoft BASIC. This piracy did not initially make Gates happy, but in the long run it made Microsoft BASIC the standard language (Isaacson 343).
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Gates was focused more on his and Allen's partnership than with school. In 2007, Gates would return to Harvard to receive an honorary degree (Isaacson 336).
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Microsoft made a deal with IBM to license them all their programming languages and their operating system, MS-DOS (Isaacson 357).
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At a press conference at the Palace Hotel Bill Gates announced the development of Windows, Microsoft's new operating system that featured a GUI (Isaacson 368).
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This office production app included such apps as Word and Excel. This application was compatible with all Microsoft products (Biography.com)
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Gates married Microsoft product manager Melinda French in 1994 (Biography.com).
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Bill and Melinda Gates have three children: Jennifer, Rory, and Phoebe (Biography.com).
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Gates stepped down from day-to-day operations and made college buddy Steve Ballmer CEO (Biography.com).
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In 2000 Gates and his wife combined many of their foundations to form the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which supported education, health, and investment in low-income communities.
