Bill Gates, fully Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington, U.S.), is an American programmer and businessperson who cofounded Microsoft Corporation, the world’s largest personal computer software company.
Gates was brilliant from childhood and wrote his first software program at 13. In high school, he helped form a bunch of programmers who computerized their school’s payroll system and started Traf-O-Data. This organization sold traffic-counting systems to local governments. In 1975 Gates, then a sophomore at Harvard University, joined his friend Paul G. Allen to develop software for primary microcomputers.
They began by adapting BASIC, a popular programming language used on large computers, to be used on microcomputers. With the Success of this project, Gates left Harvard during his junior year and, with Allen, founded Microsoft.
Gates’s sway over the infant microcomputer industry greatly inflated when Microsoft commissioned an OS known as MS-DOS to International Business Machines Corporation—then the world’s biggest computer provider and industry pacesetter—for use on its first microcomputer, the IBM PC (personal computer).
In 1981, after the machine was released, the technical standard for the PC industry was quickly set by IBM, and MS-DOS likewise pushed out competing operating systems. Whereas Microsoft’s independence strained relations with IBM, Gates dextrously manipulated the more prominent company, so it became permanently dependent on him for crucial software.
Manufacturers of IBM-compatible PCs, or clones, additionally turned to Microsoft for their essential software. By the beginning of the 1990s, he had become the PC industry’s king.
Mainly on the strength of Microsoft’s Success, Gates collected a large paper fortune as the company’s largest individual stakeholder. He became a billionaire in 1986, and within a decade, his net worth had reached the tens of billions of dollars—making him, by some estimates, the world’s wealthiest non-public individual.