Bill Gates didn't exactly come from humble origins. The family he was born into was one of wealth and leisure. His father was a well known laywer, and his mother sat on the board of directors for the First Interstate Bank and United Way, of which her father was the president of. Throughout grade school, Gates excelled in Math and Science, and when he was thirteen, he enrolled in the Lakeside School, a very prestigious and selective school in the Seattle area. While in the school, Gates took interest in programming the school's computer, and was excused from his math classes to do so. As time progressed, Gates gained experience with programming other computers during his allotted time, until he was banned from using the computer, along with a few of his friends for the entire summer for exploiting a bug in the system that allowed him to use more computer time.

After his ban was up, Gates made a deal with the CCC company to debug their software in exchange for free computer time. Eventually, the company hired Gates and his friends to write a payroll program, and they were rewarded not only free computer time, but royalties as well. After scoring 1590 out of a maximum 1600 points on the SAT exams, Bill Gates enrolled in Harvard College for a pre-law degree, but unsure of what his intent was in college. He ended up dropping out without getting a degree.

In 1975, after learning about the new Altair 8800 microcomputer, Gates contacted the company that produced them informing them that he was working on a BASIC interpretor for the platform. In reality, Gates had no such interpretor, but asked them to guage their interests. Interested, the company agreed to meet with Gates for a demo of his interpretor, and over the next few weeks, he and his friend Paul Allen worked on an emulator of the new interpretor. At the demo, the company hired them to create the full version of the interpretor for the company. In 1975, Gates and Allen named their partnership Micro-Soft, and a year later, they dropped the hyphen and registered the name "Microsoft". In 1980, Bill Gates was employed by IBM to create an interpretor for their new platform. While working for IBM, Gates created and proposed a new, but similar platform to the IBM called "86-DOS". After being rejected by the company, Gates took sole ownership of the processor, and MS-DOS became a major player in the software industry. In the coming years, Microsoft became a giant in the computer industry, and eventually the processing software was the most common and highly sold in the world. In 1985, Microsoft released the first version of Windows, a graphical output to the DOS processor. Throughout the next two decades, Windows became the software giant that it is today.

 

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