Our hero was born on October 28, 1955 in the city of Seattle, Washington.
Our hero was born on October 28, 1955 in the city of Seattle, Washington.
His mother Mary was a member of the board of First Interstate Bank, and William's father worked as a lawyer.
Our hero studied at Seattle's most privileged school, Lakeside, where he was able to develop his programming skills on a school mini-computer. At thirteen, he already wrote his first program - the game "Tic-tac-toe".
In 1970, together with his school friend Paul Allen, he wrote his first program for regulating traffic and organized a company for its distribution, which was called Traf-O-Data. On this project, they earned 20 thousand dollars.
On the wave of success, friends turned on the desire to open their own company, but the parents of our hero opposed this idea, hoping that their son will finish college and become a lawyer.
In 1973, our hero enters Harvard University, intending to either continue in the footsteps of his father, or become a professor of mathematics. According to him, he was present there with his body, but not with his soul. For most of his stay at Harvard, he played pinball, bridge and poker.
However, studying did not attract young genius, he often missed classes and was engaged in programming. He is in contact with Paul Allen, who enrolled at Washington University, but two years later he dropped out of school and moved to Boston where he started working for the Honeywell corporation.
Everything changed when Allen on the way to a friend bought the January issue of the magazine "Popular Electronics" for 1975. There on the cover was a picture of Altair-8800, the first computer for a mass buyer. With a magazine in his hands, he broke into our hero: friends realized that they had a chance.
They immediately called MITS, the company that created Altair, and said that they have a programming language with Paul, which can be used on this computer. They bluffed - they had nothing at that moment. MITS was interested in the offer, and they had to work at a furious pace, creating the code and checking it on other computers.
Our hero first touched "Altair" on the day of the presentation of his program. By all laws, the bluff had to end in failure. But the computer took the program as a native, and MITS immediately wanted to buy the rights to it. It was on this day, there was a market for software, computer software. The company Micro-Soft was born (they removed the hyphen later).
The first five customers of Microsoft went bankrupt, but the guys did not despair and in 1979 returned to Seattle. In that year, our hero was expelled from the university for absenteeism and underachievement, but this fact did not greatly upset the grieving student.
In the meantime, Microsoft, forcing time to work for itself, is buying a "raw" 86-DOS operating system for $ 50,000, from Seattle Computer and begins work on it. And soon the light saw MS-DOS, which Microsoft offered as an OS for IBM PC.
The agreement with IBM provided for payments for each copy of Microsoft software products, which provided significant dividends due to the success that fell to the share of IBM PC in the 1980s. The success of both products led to the fact that Intel architecture, IBM computers and Microsoft programs actually became industry standards.
In 1986, Microsoft shares began to be traded on the stock exchange. The value of the shares grew at a lightning speed, and a few months later at the age of 31 our hero became a billionaire for the first time. In 1988, Microsoft became the developer of computer software with the largest sales volume in the world.
In 1993, the number of registered users of Microsoft Windows is 25 million people. Thus, Windows becomes the most popular operating system in the world with a graphical interface.
In September 2014, our hero with a fortune of 81 billion dollars led the annual list of 400 richest people in the US, published by the American magazine Forbes.
It's not difficult to guess that our hero's name is Bill Gate!
