William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American businessman, investor, philanthropist, and writer best known for co-founding the software giant Microsoft, along with his childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), president, and chief software architect, while also being its largest individual shareholder until May 2014.He was a prominent pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.
William Henry Gates III was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington as the only son of William H. Gates Sr. (1925–2020) and his first wife, Mary Maxwell Gates (1929–1994). His ancestry includes English, German, and Irish/Scots-Irish. His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors of First Interstate BancSystem and United Way of America. Gates's maternal grandfather was J. W. Maxwell, a national bank president. He also has an older sister Kristi (Kristianne) and a younger sister Libby. He is the fourth of his name in his family but is known as William Gates III or "Trey" (i.e., three) because his father had the "II" suffix. The family lived in the Sand Point area of Seattle in a home that was damaged by a rare tornado when Gates was seven years old.
According to Gates, when he was young, his parents wanted him to pursue a career in law. During his childhood, his family regularly attended a church of the Congregational Christian Churches, a Protestant Reformed denomination.Gates was small for his age and was bullied as a child. The family encouraged competition; one visitor reported that "it didn't matter whether it was hearts or pickleball or swimming to the dock; there was always a reward for winning and there was always a penalty for losing".
At age 13, he enrolled in the private Lakeside prep school, where he wrote his first software program. When he was in eighth grade, the Mothers' Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the students. Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, and he was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine, an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly. After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, Gates and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC) which banned Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Gates's best friend and first business partner Kent Evans for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.
The four students formed the Lakeside Programmers Club to make money. At the end of the ban, they offered to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for extra computer time. Rather than using the system remotely via Teletype, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including Fortran, Lisp, and machine language. The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970 when the company went out of business.
The following year, a Lakeside teacher enlisted Gates and Evans to automate the school's class-scheduling system, providing them computer time and royalties in return. The duo worked diligently in order to have the program ready for their senior year. Towards the end of their junior year, Evans was killed in a mountain climbing accident, which Gates has described as one of the saddest days of his life. Gates then turned to Allen who helped him finish the system for Lakeside.
At 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen called Traf-O-Data to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor. In 1972, he served as a congressional page in the House of Representatives. He was a National Merit Scholar when he graduated from Lakeside School in 1973. He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) and enrolled at Harvard College in the autumn of 1973. He didn't stay at Harvard long enough to choose a concentration, but took mathematics (including Math 55) and graduate level computer science courses. While at Harvard, he met fellow student and future Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Gates left Harvard after two years while Ballmer stayed and graduated magna cum laude. Years later, Ballmer succeeded Gates as Microsoft's CEO and maintained that position from 2000 until his resignation in 2014.
Gates devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems presented in a combinatorics class by professor Harry Lewis. His solution held the record as the fastest version for over 30 years, and its successor is faster by only 2%. His solution was formalized and published in collaboration with Harvard computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou.
Gates remained in contact with Paul Allen and joined him at Honeywell during the summer of 1974. In 1975, the MITS Altair 8800 was released based on the Intel 8080 CPU, and Gates and Allen saw the opportunity to start their own computer software company. Gates dropped out of Harvard that same year. His parents were supportive of him after seeing how much he wanted to start his own company. He explained his decision to leave Harvard: "if things hadn't worked out, I could always go back to school. I was officially on leave."
dark sides
Bill Gates, a billionaire and philanthropist, has been attracting scrutiny for questionable conduct in work-related settings. In 2018, Melinda French Gates was dissatisfied with her husband's handling of a sexual harassment claim against his money manager. Gates pursued women who worked for him at Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2019, Microsoft's board opened an investigation into one of these cases after Gates sought to initiate an intimate relationship with a company employee in 2000. In October 2019, when the relationship between Gates and Jeffrey Epstein broke into public view, French Gates hired divorce lawyers, leading to their marriage ending.
The announcement of Bill Gates's divorce from Melinda Gates has raised concerns about the couple's social and financial implications. Several people have claimed that Gates engaged in inappropriate work-related behavior during their marriage, which led to their split. Ms. Arnold disputed the characterization of his conduct and the couple's divorce, stating that the rumors and speculation surrounding Gates's divorce are becoming increasingly absurd. Gates and French Gates met at work, and they played up the cute aspects of their office romance. Long after their marriage, Gates would occasionally pursue women in the office, creating an uncomfortable workplace environment. Six current and former employees of Microsoft, the foundation, and the firm that manages the Gates's fortune said that these incidents created an uncomfortable workplace environment. Some employees said that while they disapproved of Gates's behavior, they did not perceive it as predatory, as he seemed to be giving the women the space to refuse his advances.
The Gates family has pledged to end sexual harassment and discrimination against women, who still shoulder the majority of caregiving responsibilities. The couple faced a sexual harassment allegation against a close associate, Mr. Larson, who served as Mr. Gates's money manager for nearly 30 years. The woman who managed the bike shop hired a lawyer who wrote a letter to Mr. Gates and Ms. French Gates, accusing him of sexually harassing her. The woman reached a settlement in 2018 in which she signed a nondisclosure agreement in exchange for a payment. However, Ms. French Gates was not satisfied with the outcome and called for an independent review of the woman's allegations and Cascade's culture. The Times published an article detailing Mr. Gates's relationship with Mr. Epstein, which included details about his interactions with Epstein that Ms. French Gates had not previously known. The revelations in The Times were especially upsetting to Ms. French Gates, who had previously voiced her discomfort with her husband.
You must be logged in to post a comment.