On October 28, 1955, Microsoft co-founder, Bill Gates was born. We know him best as an entrepreneur of the personal computer revolution. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, and remains the largest individual shareholder with more than 8 percent of the common stock. Today, he spends most of his time as a philanthropist.
He was born in Seattle…
Bill Gates was born in Seattle, WA into an upper middle class family. Because his dad was a lawyer, Gates’ parents had a law career in mind for him, but as we all know, his career took a different turn. At 13, he took an interest in BASIC programming on an a GE system at his prep school. His first computer program was a game of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play the game against the computer. The next computer he programmed was a DEC PDP-10. At age 17, Gates formed a venture with Paul Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor.
The Most Famous Harvard Dropout?
In 1973, Bill Gates enrolled at Harvard College. While there, he met his future business partner, Steve Ballmer, who is now the CEO of Microsoft. He did not have a definite study plan while a student at Harvard and spent a lot of time using the school’s computers. He remained in contact with Paul Allen, joining him at Honeywell for his summer job. In 1975, the MITS Altair 8800 was released and Gates and Allen saw this as the opportunity to start their own computer software company.
Whole books have been written about the the history of Microsoft which includes the motley crew shown in the photo below and there will be plenty of High Tech History pieces written about that in the future. For today, let’s just say “Happy Birthday, Bill Gates.”
– Carole Gunst
