Gates, Bill (1955-…), is a cofounder of Microsoft Corporation. He also formerly served as the company’s chairman and chief executive officer and as its chief software architect. Microsoft is the world’s largest developer and publisher of software for personal computers. The company’s success has made Gates one of the wealthiest people in the world. Gates contributes extensively to charitable causes through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
William Henry Gates was born in Seattle on Oct. 28, 1955. He set up his first software company at age 15 with a schoolmate named Paul Allen. In 1975, he and Allen began to design programs for personal computers (PC’s), which had just entered the marketplace. The two founded Microsoft that year. In 1980, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) chose Microsoft to develop the operating system for its first personal computer, the PC. An operating system is the main program for controlling a computer’s functions. Gates wrote the Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-DOS) for IBM. Microsoft sold millions of copies of MS-DOS for use in IBM and IBM-compatible PC’s.
In 1985, Microsoft introduced the first version of the popular Windows operating system. Microsoft has sold tens of millions of copies of Windows. The company continued to grow under Gates’s guidance. Today, it produces many types of software for business and consumer use.
See also Gates Foundation ; Microsoft Corporation .
