Bill Gates Bio
...the world's leading provider of software for personal computers.
Bill Gates was born on October 28, 1955. He and his two sisters grew up in Seattle. Their father, William H. Gates II, is a Seattle attorney. Mary Gates, their late mother, was a schoolteacher, University of Washington regent and chairwoman of United Way International.
Gates attended public elementary school before moving on to the private Lakeside School in North Seattle. It was at Lakeside that Gates began his career in personal computer software, programming computers at age 13.
In 1973, Gates entered Harvard University as a freshman, where he lived down the hall from Steve Ballmer, who is now Microsoft's president. While at Harvard, Gates developed a version of the programming language BASIC for the first microcomputer - the MITS Altair. BASIC was first developed by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College in the mid-1960s. In his junior year, Gates dropped out of Harvard to devote his energies full-time to Microsoft, a company he had started in 1975 with his boyhood friend Paul Allen. Guided by a belief that the personal computer would be a valuable tool on every office desktop and in every home, they began developing software for personal computers.
Gates' foresight and vision regarding personal computing have been central to the success of Microsoft and the software industry. Gates is actively involved in key management and strategic decisions at Microsoft, and plays an important role in the technical development of new products. Much of his time is devoted to meeting with customers and staying in contact with Microsoft employees around the world through e-mail.
Under Gates' leadership, Microsoft's mission is continuously to advance and improve software technology, and to make it easier, more cost-effective and more enjoyable for people to use computers. The...
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