Bill Gates
...Gates III was born on October 28, 1955, to William H. Gates II, an attorney, and Mary Maxwell Gates, a schoolteacher. Gates and his two sisters, Kristianne and Libby, grew up in Seattle, Washington. His family called him "Trey". His grandmother gave him his nickname because it is a card player's term for three (Lowe 3). On January 1, 1994, Bill married Melinda French, a Product Manager/Marketing Executive at Microsoft. They have two children, Jennifer Katharine, born in 1996, and Rory John, born in 1999. Early on in life, it was apparent that he inherited the ambition, intelligence, and competitive spirit that had helped his progenitors rise to the top in their chosen professions. In elementary school he quickly surpassed all of his peer's abilities in nearly all subjects, especially math and science. He read the World Book Encyclopedia from A to Z by the time he was nine years old. He was so far ahead that he often became bored (Dickinson 12). His parents recognized is intelligence and decided to enroll him in the exclusive Lakeside Private School, an all-boys institution known for its intense academic environment. There he also met his best friend and business partner, Paul Allen.
In 1968, when he was in the eighth grade, his teachers introduced him to computers and programming languages. This was at a time when computers were still room-sized machines run by scientists in white coats. Bill's first program was a tic-tac-toe game, which he made on a mainframe that the school bought after a fund-raiser. The team also wrote a scheduling program for the school—which coincidentally placed the two in the same classes as the prettiest girls in school (Biography.com 1). Soon afterward, Gates and Allen, along with other students convinced a local computer company, Digital Equipment Corporation, to give them free access to its PDP-10, a new...
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