Bill Gates
Co-founder 1975Background
Bill Gates grew up in Seattle and began programming as a teenager at Lakeside School, where he met Paul Allen. Before Microsoft, he wrote code for school scheduling projects, worked with Allen on Traf-O-Data, and entered Harvard with a reputation for unusual programming intensity. Gates was not merely a technical founder; he was the commercial architect of Microsoft's earliest strategy. When Allen saw the Altair 8800 opportunity in 1975, Gates helped turn a speculative idea into a working BASIC interpreter and then into a business. His background combined mathematics, programming discipline, legal caution, and competitive instinct. That mix shaped Microsoft's emphasis on licensing, contracts, platform control, and developer tools. Gates left Harvard to focus on Microsoft because he believed the software layer around personal computers could scale faster than hardware manufacturing. His early experience also made him unusually sensitive to piracy and intellectual property, which explains his famous 1976 letter arguing that software creators needed to be paid.
Role at Microsoft Corporation
Microsoft was founded in 1975 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, childhood friends from Seattle who had spent their teenage years finding ways to get free time on mainframe computers. In January 1975 Allen saw the Altair 8800, an early microcomputer, on the cover of Popular Electronics and showed it to Gates. The machine had no programming language, so the two wrote a version of BASIC for it in a few weeks. They worked on an emulator and had never touched an actual Altair. They founded 'Micro-Soft' to sell the software. The decisive deal came in 1980, when IBM needed an operating system for its new Personal Computer. Gates bought an existing system, QDOS, for $50,000, adapted it into MS-DOS and licensed it to IBM. Microsoft kept the right to license MS-DOS to other computer makers, and that right became the basis of its dominance in PC software.
Bill Gates was born in 1955.