William Henry Gates, III was born October 28, 1955 in
Seattle, Washington. He was the middle child of three born
to William and Mary Gates. A trey, as he was called
because of the III, was sent to a private school by his
father, a lawyer, and mother, a former teacher now on
several prestigious boards (Moritz, 238). At age 13, Bill
had completely taught himself programming after taking
computer studies class. After scoring a perfect 800 on the
mathematics half of the SAT, he graduated from Lakeside
school and enrolled at Harvard University as a prelaw
major. As a student, Gates was a wonder. He received an
A in an economics class without attending and cramming
the night before the final exam. In June 1975, Bill Gates
dropped out of Harvard to pursue a career in computers
full time.
Later that year after dropping out of Harvard he moved to
New Mexico. There he and Allen Kay established
Microsoft to produce their Basic for the MITS. Eighteen
months later they were a few hundred thousand dollars
richer and were hired by Tandy to develop software for its
radio shack computers. Gates and Allen then moved their
headquarters to Seattle, Washington. In Seattle, Gates
re-wrote an operating system and called it MS-DOS,
which stands for Microsoft Disk Operating System.
Microsoft would eventually sell the rights of MS-DOS to
IBM, making it a major computer corporation. Other
computer companies wanted Microsoft to produce
software for their computers, including Steve Jobs and
Steve Wozniak of Apple computers. With the operating
system established, Gates and Microsoft set out to create
applications software, for tasks such as financial analysis or
word proc ...