William Henry Gates III, known as Bill Gates, was born October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington.
He is the son of William H. Gates Sr., an outstanding lawyer, and Mary Maxwell Gates, a member on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and United Way. Gates' parents planned law to be a pursuing job for him, but that was not what he had in mind and what did changed his life forever. His parents had always pushed their family to strive for the best results.
Gates gained his interest in computers instead of law when he registered at Lakeside School, a private prepatatory school, at age 13. A club at the school, the Mother's club, helped make proceeds to the school. The proceeds helped raise money for a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a General Electric (GE) computer. The only problem was that the school needed someone that would be willing to give up their time to learn and write code for the computer and to teach other students.
This new opportunity gave Gates an interest to code for the school's computer. Gates used BASIC to code and learn about the first generation of computers.
BASIC, known as Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, was designed as an interactive mainframe timesharing language that became widely used on personal computers such as the computers Bill Gates would start to learn to program.
BASIC was the start, but Gates was fascinated in learning more about the computer language. Gates' first program was a tic tac toe program that students could play against an AI computer. The satisfaction got to him as he really liked how the machine's code executed what it was suppose to do perfectly. Gates along with three other students worked on dec pdp minicomputers. Some of these computers belonged to the Computer Center Corporation (CCC), resulting in a ban of the four students from being on the computers because they utilized bugs in their computers.
After their ban was over the students offered to the CCC that they would find bugs in their software as a benefit to have morefree time to learn about new code. This gave Gates a chance to fix the bugs, learn about error, and study source code. This arrangement for the students lasted until 1970 because the company went out of business. During the same year, the four students got an offer to write a program for Information Science, Inc. in COBOL, an English code mainly for business.
The school finally had seen how hard he Gates was working and how far his programming skills have come that the school allowed Gates to program the school's schedule for student's classes. Ofcourse, Gates used this as an opportunity to make his schedule the best so Gates changed the code so that he was placed in with "a large number of girls" by the code and that it happened like that somehow, not of his doing.
Gates teamed up with Allen, one of the other three students working for Information Science, Inc. and worked on a project with the invention of the Traf-O-Data.
The Traf-O-Data was used as a traffic counter on the streets of vehicles and pedestrians using the Intel 8008 processor.
Gates was a National Merit Scholar at Lakeside that after he scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT, he enrolled at Harvard College in 1973. He chose to take a pre-law major just like his parents wanted him too, but also took mathematics and graduate level computer science classes.
At Harvard, Gates met Steve Ballmer who would soon work for Gates at Microsoft and become CEO of the company after Gates left from 2000 to 2014. Gates did not know what to do with his life, but all he knew for sure was that he loved computers. During the summer, Gates got in contact with Allen and joined him at Honeywell, an American consumer product company. Gates dropped out of Harvard to start his own computer software company with Allen right after the Altair 8800 with the Intel 8080 CPU. This minicomputer was recognized as the spark or the minicomputers' revolution. It was the first successful personal computer that led Gates and Allen to be the founders of Microsoft.