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Bill Gates

Bill Gates
William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington) is an American entrepreneur and the co-founder, chairman, former chief software architect, and former CEO of Microsoft, the world's largest software company. Forbes magazine's list of The World's Billionaires has ranked him as the richest person in the world for the last thirteen consecutive years. and recent estimates put his net worth near $56 billion. When family wealth is considered, his family ranks second behind the Walton family. Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. Although he is widely respected by people who see his wealth as a product of intelligence and foresight He enrolled at Harvard University in the fall of 1973 intending to get a pre-law degree, but did not have a definite study plan. While at Harvard, he met his future business partner, Steve Ballmer

BASIC
After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates contacted MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform. In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS's interest. MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demo, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration, held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC. Paul Allen hired into MITS, and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with Allen at MITS, dubbing their partnership in November 1975 "Micro-soft" (with a hyphen). Within a year, the hyphen was dropped, and on November 26, 1976, the trade name "Microsoft" was registered with the USPTO.

Windows
In the early 1980s Microsoft introduced its own version of the graphical user interface (GUI), based on ideas pioneered by the Xerox corporation, and further developed by Apple. Microsoft released "Windows" as an addition and alternative to their DOS command line, and to compete with other systems on the market that employed a GUI. By the early 1990s, Windows had pushed other DOS-based GUIs like GEM and GEOS out of the market. The release of Windows 3.0 in 1990 was a tremendous success, selling around 10 million copies in the first two years and cementing Microsoft's dominance in operating systems sales

Personal life

Gates married Melinda French of Dallas, Texas on January 1, 1994. They have three children: Jennifer Katharine Gates (1996), Rory John Gates (1999) and Phoebe Adele Gates (2002). Bill Gates' house is one of the most expensive houses in the world, and is a modern 21st century earth-sheltered home in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington. According to King County public records, as of 2006, the total assessed value of the property (land and house) is $125 million, and the annual property tax is just under $1 million.