Bill Gates is considered one of the founders of modern technology. We all know his most impressive accomplishment was the founding of Microsoft, but you can add philanthropist and entrepreneur to the list of his accomplishments over the years.
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Bill Gates was born on October 28th, 1955 in Seattle Washington to parents William H. Gates and Mary Maxwell Gates. Gates is the second of three children, his sisters are Kristi and Libby Gates. Bill showed his interest in technology at the young age of 13, the first computer program he ever wrote was a game of tic tac toe that would allow you to play against the computer. In 1973 Gates graduated from Lakeside School, he graduated as a National Merit Scholar and went on to attend Harvard that fall.
During his first year of college Gates began working on an algorithm for the math problem known as Pancake Sorting presented to him by the professor Harry Lewis. This problem asks the minimum number of flips required flip all the pancakes in order of size. Gates created an algorithm that was the fastest anyone had every seen in over thirty years. This algorithm was later published in collaboration with another scientist named Christos Papadimitriou.
In the summer of 1974 Gates began working at Honeywell with his friend Paul Allen, who is the cofounder of Microsoft and long time friend of Gates. During their time spent at Honeywell, Gates and Allen were inspired to start a software company of their own. This decision led Gates to drop out of Harvard to pursue his passion for computers.
In 1975 the duo began working for MITS in Albuquerque, Gates and Allen developed an Altair emulator, (which is a software that allows one computer to mirror another computer). After their time spent at MITS the pair began their own partnership as they’d originally wanted to and named it “Micro-Soft.” The name was eventually combined and the hyphen was dropped when they were officially trademarked on November 26th, 1976.
In 1980 Microsoft was approached by IBM to write a BASIC interpreter for their upcoming computer. While working out this deal Gates also created an operating system for IBM and this started a new partnership. Working with IBM helped Microsoft become very influential in the tech world and consumers noticed. Five years later Microsoft launched their now extremely popular Microsoft Windows.
After many years of working on developing Microsoft into the influential company it is today, Bill Gates stepped down as the chairman on February 4th, 2014. As we mentioned earlier Bill Gates is also known for his charity work. He is the founder of what is now known as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is worth more than 34.6 billion dollars. It’s been stated that Bill and his wife Melinda are some of the most charitable people in the entire world, giving over 28 billion dollars to various charities. Bill Gates has not only been an influential person in the technology world, but also in his personal life. He will continue to live on giving back to the world and hoping to improve it.