bill Gates is an American inventor computer programmer philanthropist and businessman who was born in Seattle Washington He is reportedly worth nearly $80 billion making him one of the wealthiest people in the country He founded and was head of Microsoft Corporation for years and is still on the board for the computer software giant
Gates was born to an upper middle class family His father was an attorney his mother was a banker who worked for the United Way for many years He is credited for being the father of the modern computer and for almost single handedly starting the personal computer revolution He studied at Harvard University but did not graduate because of his desire to develop new software
As a 13 year old student at the Lakeside School which was an exclusive college preparatory school Gates was introduced to computer programming That year he developed a program that allowed users to play tic tac toe against the computer Gates was reportedly fascinated by the computer's ability to reproduce software code In 1975 Gate was reportedly fascinated by the computer's ability to reproduce software code In 1975 Gates was approached a company called Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems MITS He convinced the owner that he had written a program that would work with his platform The owner of the company bought into Gates innovations and the two men reached an agreement to develop to develop software for MITS The Microsoft Company was born
Gates went on to develop the Windows operating system with then partner IBM Corporation The two companies had differences though and their partnership ended guickly Gates left Microsoft in 2000 but remains on its board of directors He remained active with the company for several years before stepping down in February 2014 becoming Technical Advisor for the firm