Dale Briska 12/21/17Mrs. Smith Period: 2      William Henry Gates was born on October 28th, 1955, in Seattle, Washington. Bill Gates is one of the most influential and the richest people in the world. His father, William Gates Sr, was a senior lawyer, and his mother served as an executive for a major bank. At age Thirteen Gates attended private Lakeside school. He taught himself to programming in Basic with enabled him to designed a simple tic tac toe program. Gate’s parents were strong believers in public education. Gates enjoyed the process of working with computers and arranged with a company Computer Center Corporation (CCC) to spend time on their computers. While there he learned source code, such as Fortran, Machine Code and Lisp. Bill loved strategy and board games. He was also a good reader. He spent most of his time reading or programming. Gates and Paul Allen were caught exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time. In 1973 Gates goes to college at Harvard as a pre law major. During college he quickly shifted his focus towards other subjects. Gates goes through the university’s most complicated mathematics with ease and graduate level computer science courses. In his dorm room Gates calls MITS, the maker of the world’s first personal computer. He offers to develop software for the MITS Altair. MITS accepts and buys his language for $3,000. After just two years, Gates drops out of college to work on his programing and his company which he referred to as Micro-soft with his close friend Paul Allen. Gates and Allen register the trademark “Microsoft.” Microsoft was then born, but Gates had more work ahead of him. In 1977, he sets up Microsoft in Albuquerque, N.M., where MITS is headquartered. By 1978 Microsoft’s year-end sales exceed $1 million. Gates gains a reputation for being tough, but dedicated to his job. Gates success starts to grow and things could not be better. During 1979 microsoft was relocated in Bellevue, Washington, a suburb of Gates’ hometown, Seattle. Microsoft then  incorporates and buys the rights to the operating system “DOS” from Seattle Computer Products. The system is then modified and renamed MS-DOS, and the company licenses it to IBM for the company’s new personal computer. Allen is forced to leave microsoft in 1983 after developing Hodgkin’s disease. After, Microsoft introduces windows as a extension of the MS-DOS operating system.In 1987, Bill Gates success was at its greatest and became the youngest billionaire ever at the age of 31. Then things take a turn for the worst when The Federal Trade Commission begins an investigation into a possible collusion between IBM and Microsoft. The FTC charged IBM and Microsoft for collaborating to divide up and share the market for operating systems in an anticompetitive way. Basically meaning helping each other out without consumers knowing. IBM’s OS/2 would capture the high-end of the market and Microsoft’s Windows covering the low-end of the market.  In July, at age 39 and with a fortune of $12.9 billion, Gates becomes the world’s richest man. Later that summer, Microsoft introduces Internet Explorer to the world, as part of Windows 95.  Gates publishes another best-selling book, “Business @ the Speed of Thought”, about the interconnectedness of business and technology. That year he begins appearing more and more in pop culture as his success spreads. In 1999 Bill Gates steps down as CEO of Microsoft. Gates’ former Harvard dorm-mate and right-hand man Steve Ballmer takes over the helm, while Gates becomes chief software architect. In 2006 Gates announces that his role as an executive at Microsoft will be phased out over the following two years. His intention, he says, is to spend more time working with The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Now we have come to the present and Bill Gates is on the verge of becoming the richest man on the planet. Through his hard work and dedication Bill Has become of the greatest and most successful business man to be alive today.