Bill Gates
Bill Gates full name William Henry Gates III (1955- ). US businessman and creator of computer software. Gates was born and brought up in Seattle. At the age of 14 he founded a computer programming company with three friends; within a year they had earned $20,000 by selling their traffic-counting system to local governments. In 1975 he dropped out of his law course at Harvard to found the Microsoft Software company in Redmond, Washington. Gates’s domination of the emerging computer industry began in 1980-81, when he devised an operating system and licensed it to IBM. MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System) became the standard operating system for nearly all IBM and IBM-compatible personal computers. During the 1980’s Microsoft also cornered the market in more specialized software. When the company went public in 1986, Gates became a multimillionaire at the age of 31. Five years later he was ranked as the world’s richest man. In the 1990’s Gates made a fresh fortune from sales of Windows, a system that enables a computer to be operated with on-screen symbols rather than complex keyboard commands. A revised version was launched amid huge publicity in 1995.
