Gates would drop out of Harvard to found Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975, building the company into the dominant force in personal computer software through MS-DOS and Windows. His path from a Seattle prep school computer terminal to the world's richest man reshaped how ordinary people interacted with computers.
Born into a comfortable Seattle family, Gates got an early break most kids of his era never had: his private school, Lakeside, acquired a computer terminal in 1968 when he was thirteen, connected via telephone line to a mainframe. He and his friends, including Paul Allen, became obsessed, sometimes sneaking out at night to use spare computer time offered by a local company in exchange for finding bugs in its software.
That obsession curdled into a business partnership. Gates and Allen founded Micro-Soft in 1975 after seeing a magazine cover featuring the Altair 8800, one of the first personal computer kits, and realizing no one had written a practical programming language for it. They licensed BASIC to the Altair's manufacturer before either of them had even seen the machine in person.
Gates's real masterstroke came in 1980, when he negotiated a deal with IBM to supply an operating system for its new personal computer while retaining the right to license that system, MS-DOS, to other manufacturers. IBM didn't foresee how thoroughly clones would flood the market, and Microsoft's software became the default nervous system of the PC industry for the next two decades, eventually making Gates the wealthiest man in the world by the mid-1990s.
Key people: Bill Gates