1955– 
SOFTWARE DEVELOPER UNITED STATES
Software creation is . . . a mix of artistry and science.
—BILL GATES
Sixteen-year-old Bill looked up from the Traf-O-Data—a machine he and his friend Paul invented to solve traffic problems. The city official sat on the couch in the Gates’ living room and cleared his throat, waiting impatiently for Bill’s demonstration to start. Bill fed a piece of tape with instructions into the Traf-O-Data, which was designed to analyze cumbersome traffic data in a matter of minutes. The machine whirred a few times, then nothing.
“Tell him, Mom. Tell him it really works!”
“I don’t have time for this, kid,” the man said in frustration, getting up to leave. “Try me again when you’re out of high school.”
Little did the city official know that this frustrated boy standing before him would become one of the youngest billionaires in US history. But Bill knew. He had already told many of his friends that he would be a millionaire by age twenty-five. Even at sixteen, he had already founded his own computer company and invented the Traf-O-Data machine.
Computer bugs first got their name in 1945 when a research assistant found a moth in one of the first experimental computers.
William Henry Gates III (or Trey, as his family called him) was born in Seattle in 1955. His parents were strict and enforced several house rules: keep your room clean and no television on weeknights. Without television, Bill devoured countless books—especially science fiction. But no matter how much his parents bugged him, Bill’s room was a disaster area. This messy look would later become one of his trademarks at Microsoft.
The Gates family played lots of board games together, and Bill was extremely competitive. In fact, he was competitive in just about everything. When Bill’s teacher assigned the class to write four to five pages, Bill wrote thirty. But his enthusiasm didn’t help his grades much, so Bill’s parents transferred him to a private school in the seventh grade. He struggled academically and socially during his first year at the new school. He was much smaller than other boys his age, and he had enormous feet—size 13—but eventually he made some friends, including Kent Evans. Bill and Kent both liked math and science, and read Fortune magazine together. “We were going to conquer the world,” said Bill.
In 1985, Bill and Paul Allen donated $2.2 million to their old high school for a math and science center named after their friend Kent Evans.
After two years at the private school, Bill found his niche. That year the school bought a Teletype machine. At the time, the only computers in existence were huge mainframe computers that cost millions of dollars. The Teletype machine connected the school to a mainframe computer downtown, and the students were charged an hourly rate for their computer time. Bill hung out in the computer room constantly and soon learned the programming language BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) to communicate with the computer. He created his first computer program, a tic-tac-toe game, at thirteen! He then wrote other game programs: a lunar landing game and computer versions of his favorite board games, Risk and Monopoly.
Bill was addicted to the computer and soon met other computer nerds, including Paul Allen. By ninth grade, Bill’s grades were vastly improved. “I came up with a new form of rebellion,” he said. The computer offered an outlet for Bill’s creative and mathematical mind but it also got him into trouble. Some of his programs were known to crash the entire mainframe. Bill and his friends often broke into the computer’s security system to change their computer time so they would be charged less. When the hackers were eventually caught, Bill was almost expelled!
Bill and his wife set up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has made some of the largest charity donations in history. In 2010 they donated $10 billion for the development and distribution of vaccines to people in the world’s poorest locations.
As his reputation for programming grew, Bill was often approached by teachers asking for computer help. The school wanted Bill and Kent to design a computer program to help with class scheduling. They even offered to pay them for it! But a week later, tragedy struck. Kent, who had gone mountain climbing, fell and died. Bill was devastated by his best friend’s death; they had been inseparable since they had first met. For weeks Bill was stunned, incapable of doing anything at all. He eventually went back to work on the scheduling program, asking Paul Allen to help him finish.
Bill and Paul went on to create the Traf-O-Data machine. Even though Traf-O-Data didn’t always work perfectly, it was a success. Cities all over the Northwest and Canada eventually used it to analyze traffic data and to reduce congestion on city streets. As the money began to flow in, Bill’s business skills emerged. He hired his buddies and classmates to work for the company. From their invention, Bill and Paul earned over $20,000 (which in 1970 was a serious chunk of change for a couple of teenagers!). They also helped design a computer program for the Bonneville Power Administration to control the power grid for the entire Northwest and a program for TRW, a defense contractor.
As a break from work, Bill and his friends would sometimes sneak onto empty construction sites and have bulldozer races!
With his improved grades and high test scores, Bill won a National Merit Scholarship and was accepted at Harvard University, where he studied literature, social science, math, and chemistry. But his mind was always on computers. People thought Bill was crazy when he predicted that, one day, everyone would have their own personal computer.
Bill’s prediction was on track when, in 1975, Ed Roberts invented the Altair. Although the Altair couldn’t do much compared to today’s computers (it had only 4K of memory and didn’t even have a keyboard), it was the first true PC. A technical revolution had arrived—and Bill and Paul hoped to be a part of it. They formed a new company called Microsoft (an abbreviation for microcomputer software) and decided to build a BASIC software program for the Altair. For the next seven weeks, Bill and Paul worked day and night to create the program. Finally, they finished it—the first software program for a PC. Bill was just nineteen years old.
Orders began pouring in for their new computer software—the first year revenues were more than $100,000! By January of 1977, Bill dropped out of Harvard to run Microsoft full time. He and Paul hired some of their old computer pals from Lakeside to work for them. Known as the Microkids, this gang of computer programmers was anything but typical. Many customers were shocked to hear rock music playing as the long-haired Microkids created software in jeans and T-shirts, instead of the suits and ties typical of most businesses.
In 1981, Bill met with IBM to discuss the opportunity of a lifetime. IBM wanted Microsoft to develop an operating system for its new PC. Even though Bill was late for the meeting (he had to buy a tie first), he convinced IBM to go with Microsoft. IBM’s new PC became a hit, and every IBM computer had Microsoft software, MS-DOS. At twenty-four, Bill had made the deal of the century! Other computer companies began making IBM clones (copies of IBM’s PC), and they all used Microsoft software. By 1987, thirty-two-year-old Bill Gates was the youngest billionaire in the country.
Bill used some of his fortune to build his dream house. It has a theater, a dining room that seats 120 people, a trampoline room, a swimming pool, and parking space for his 20 sports cars.
Microsoft has been involved in the computer industry almost from the very beginning, and it’s still a strong presence today. The company’s most famous products include MS-DOS, Windows, Internet Explorer, Microsoft.NET, and the Microsoft Office Suite. Bill semiretired in 2008, scaling back his daily involvement as chairman of the company to part-time so he could focus on the philanthropic goals of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Through the foundation, Bill and Melinda hope to “fund innovative ideas that could help remove . . . barriers: new techniques to help farmers in developing countries grow more food and earn more money; new tools to prevent and treat deadly diseases; new methods to help students and teachers in the classroom. . . . We think an essential role of philanthropy is to make bets on promising solutions that governments and businesses can’t afford to make.”11