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Bill Gates Born
Bill Gates was born in Seattle to William H. Gates Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates. -
Bill Gates Enrolls at Lakeside School
When Gates was 13, he enrolled in Lakeside School, an exclusive prep school. When he was in 8th grade, he took an interest in the school's GE computer and was excused from math class to program in BASIC. Gates and three other students were banned from using a PDP-10 after the company that made them caught them exploiting bugs in the OS for free computer time. At the end of the ban, Gates went to the company's offices to study the source code. -
Gates Takes an Interest with Computer Programming
In 1970, the company Gates and his friends had been working with went bankrupt. The following year, however, Information Sciences Inc. hired them to write programs, rewarding them with computer time and royalties. Gates later helped Lakeside to write a program to schedule students in classes. Gates graduated from Lakeside in 1973. -
Gates Enrolls at Harvard
Gates scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT and enrolled at Harvard in the autmun of 1973. While at Harvard, he met Steve Ballmer, a future CEO of Microsoft. -
Gates Starts Up Microsoft
After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Science, Gates contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Services, creators of a new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the program. In November 1975, Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work at MITS. They named their partnership Micro-Soft, but the hyphen was dropped within a year. -
Gates and Microsoft
From Microsoft's founding in 1975 until 2006, Gates had primary responsibility for the company's product strategy. He aggressively broadened the company's range of products, and wherever Microsoft achieved a dominant position he vigorously defended it. He gained a reputation for being distant to others. -
Microsoft Early Years
Microsoft separated from MITS in late 1976, and moved to Bellevue, Washington on January 1, 1979. Gates oversaw business details, but continued to write and read code. In 1980, IBM approached Microsoft regarding its new computer, the IBM PC. After several weeks, Microsoft delivered an OS named PC DOS and sold it for $50,000. Microsoft delivered its first version of Windows in 1985.
