Gates

Early life

Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, to William H. Gates, Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates. His family was wealthy; his father was a prominent lawyer, his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way, and her father, J. W. Maxwell, was a national bank president. Gates has one older sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and one younger sister, Libby. He was the fourth of his name in his family, but was known as William Gates III or "Trey" because his father had dropped his own "III" suffix.[6] Early on in his life, Gates' parents had a law career in mind for him.[7]

At thirteen he enrolled in the Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school.[8] When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy an ASR-33 teletype terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the school's students.[9] Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly. When he reflected back on that moment, he commented on it and said, "There was just something neat about the machine."[10] After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, he and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside studentsвЂ"Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent EvansвЂ"for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.[11]

At the end of the ban, the four students offered to debug CCC's software in exchange for free computer time. Rather than use the system via teletype, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including FORTRAN, LISP, and machine language. The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970, when it went out of business. The following year, Information Sciences Inc. hired the four Lakeside students to write a payroll program in COBOL, providing them computer time and royalties. After his administrators became aware of his programming abilities, Gates wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students. He later stated that "it was hard to tear myself away from a machine at which I could so unambiguously demonstrate success."[10] At age 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor. That first year he made $20,000; however, when his clients discovered his age, business slowed.[12]

Gates graduated from Lakeside School in 1973. He scored 1590 out of 1600 on his SATs, the standardized test for college admissions in the United States,[13] and subsequently enrolled at Harvard College in the fall of 1973.[14] While at Harvard, he met his future business partner, Steve Ballmer, whom he later appointed as CEO of Microsoft. He also met computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou at Harvard, with whom he collaborated on a paper about algorithms.[15] He did not have a definite study plan while a student at Harvard, and eventually took a leave of absence in 1975.[16] After Intel released the Intel 8080 CPU, Gates realized that this was the first computer chip which cost less than $200 that could run BASIC, making it the most affordable chip at the time to run inside a personal computer.[14] He figured that this was the only chance he would get to take advantage of the timing, and decided to start a computer software company with Paul Allen.[17] He had talked this decision over with his parents, who were supportive of him after seeing how much Gates wanted to start a software company.[16]

Microsoft

Main articles: History of Microsoft and Microsoft

BASIC

After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform.[18] In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS's interest. MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demo, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration, held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC. Paul Allen was hired into MITS,[19] and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with Allen at MITS in Albuquerque in November 1975. They named their partnership "Micro-soft" and had their first office located in Albuquerque.[19] Within a year, the hyphen was dropped, and on November 26, 1976, the trade name "Microsoft" was registered with the USPTO.[19]

Microsoft's BASIC was popular with computer hobbyists, but Gates discovered that a pre-market copy had leaked into the community and was being widely copied