#)Bill Gates was born in the year 1955,is an  American business executive, who serves as chairman of Microsoft Corporation, which is the leading computer software company in the world.

#)Bill Gates cofounded Microsoft corporation in the year 1975 with his  high school friend Paul Allen and their picture is shown below

#)The  success of the company made Bill Gates one of the most influential figures in the computer industry and, eventually, led to become one of the richest people in the world.

#)He was born in Seattle, Washington, William Henry Gates III and he attended the public school through the sixth grade.

#)The picture below shows the present resident of Bill Gates in Seattle

#)When he was promoted to the seventh grade, he entered Seattle’s exclusive Lakeside School, and that is the place where he met  Allen.

#)It was in 1968, when Gates was first introduced to computers and programming languages ,where  he was studying in the eighth grade.

#)That year Lakeside bought a teletype machinewhich connected to a mainframe computer over phone lines.

#)At that time, the school was one of the few schools in USA that provided students with access to a computer.

#)Inspiring with this, Gates, Allen, and other students managed to  convince a local computer company so that they coukd get free access to its PDP-10, a new minicomputer made by Digital Equipment Corporation.

#)In exchange for the computer time, the students tried to find flaws in the system.

#)Gates managed to spent much of his free time on the PDP-10 learning programming languages such as BASIC, Fortran, and LISP and eventually gained knowledge about this.

#)In 1972 Gates and Allen founded Traf-O-Data, which is a company that designed and built computerized car-counting machines for the traffic analysis.

#)This  project introduced them to the programmable 8008 microprocessor from the  Intel Corporation.

#)While he was attending Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1975, Gates again teamed with Allen to develop a version of the BASIC programming language for the Altair 8800, the first personal computer ever.

#)Then they  licensed the software to the manufacturer of the Altair, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), and formed Microsoft ,originally called as  Micro-soft, to develop versions of BASIC for other computer companies.

#)It was during this time Gates decided to drop out of Harvard in his junior year so that he could able  to devote his time to Microsoft.

#)It was in 1980 Microsoft had a great turning point as it closed a pivotal deal with International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) , so that they can provide the operating system for the IBM PC personal computer.

#)As part of this deal, Microsoft also retained the right to license the operating system to other companies.

#)The success of the IBM PC made MS-DOS operating system, an industry standard and it was very efficient

#)Microsoft’s revenues skyrocketed as the other computer makers licensed MS-DOS and demand for personal computers surged.

#)By the year 1986 Microsoft offered its stock to the public and by 1987 rapid appreciation of the stock had made Gates, who was 31 years of age at that time, the youngest ever self-made billionaire.

#)During  the 1990s, as Microsoft’s Windows operating system and Office application software achieved worldwide market dominance, and Bill Gates amassed a fortune worth tens of billions of dollars.

#)With this his successes, however, Gates was also accused of using his company’s power to stifle competition.

#)Again in 2000 a federal judge found Microsoft guilty of violating antitrust laws and ordered it split into two different companies.

#)But an appeals court overturned the breakup order in 2001 but upheld the judge's ruling that Microsoft had abused its power to protect its Windows monopoly.

#)However in November 2001, Microsoft reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department and nine states, and a year later, the settlement was upheld by a federal district court judge.

#)Bill Gates managed to  make personal investments in other high-technology companies.

#)He also sits on the board of one biotechnology company and has invested in a number of others.

#)He founded Corbis Corporation in 1989 , which now owns the largest collection of digital images in the world.

#)In the late 1990s Gates became more involved in philanthropy and with his wife he established the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which later became the largest foundation in the world.

#)He authored two books The Road Ahead, which details his vision of technology’s role in society, and Business @ the Speed of Thought (1999), which discusses the role technology can play in running a business.

#)In 1998 Gates appointed an executive vice president of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, to the position of president, but Gates he continued to serve as Microsoft’s chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) and the image of Steve Ballmer is shown below

#)He then transferred the title of CEO to Ballmer In 2000  .

#)While he reamained the  chairman of the company, Gates also took on the title of chief software architect to focus on the development of new products and technologies.

#)It was during June 2006, Gates announced that he would begin concentrate on a  full-time role at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation instead of Microsoft and he also  relinquished his title of chief software architect to Ray Ozzie, who was a veteran leader in computer technology and creator of Lotus Notes.

#)However Gates planned to remain as the chairman of Microsoft and he is the  largest shareholder of the company,

#)In July 2008 he said, he would have only a part-time role at the company he cofounded.

#)Thats really a great thing as he decided to help the poor rather than concentaring on earning money alone