Bill Gates went from an upper middle-class family to the one of the richest men in the world; who owns the largest software company, Microsoft. Neither Bill, nor Microsoft have reached their peak, but many events helped to lead them to where they are today. In the beginning, Bill Gates, a skinny, shy awkward boy born on October 28, 1955 to Mary and William Gates. As a teenager, Bill seemed an unlikely successor to his overachieving parents. His father, an attorney and his mother a teacher, University of Washington regent, and chairwoman of the United Way placed him in Lakeside. This is a very elite private school. It was there, that Bill was first introduced to computers. The following year, he wrote his first computer program, then a scheduling program for the school - which coincidentally placed him and his best friend, Paul Allen, in the same classes as the prettiest girls in the school.
Bill was accepted to Harvard University in the fall of 1973. Bill did not willingly venture to parties as most college students do, unless dragged there by his friend Steve Ballmer, whom he later repaid by naming him president of Microsoft. He slacked off a bit always trying to get the highest grades by putting in the least amount of energy. In his second year he dropped out, he and Paul Allen founded a company called Traf-O-Data, which analyzed city traffic data. Though a good idea, there was not much need for it. After reading an article in Popular Mechanics, Gates and Allen contacted M.I.T.S. in regards to providing software for the new computer Altair 8800. They were soon contracted for programming languages and moved to New Mexico and started Micro-soft (the hyphen would later be dropped). Soon IBM contacted the two asking for an operating system for their fir ...