Bill Gates

William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle in 1955 into a comfortable family ; his father was a lawyer and his mother a corporate board member. From 1968, at Lakeside School, he gained access to a time-sharing terminal — an exceptional privilege for a teenager — and struck up a friendship with Paul Allen. He entered Harvard in 1973 but left in 1975 to found Microsoft with Allen in Albuquerque. Their first product was a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800, the first widely available microcomputer. A strategy of licensing software rather than bundling it with hardware defined the company from the outset. The turning point came in 1980 when IBM sought an operating system for its forthcoming IBM PC. Microsoft bought QDOS from Seattle Computer Products, renamed it MS-DOS and retained ownership while licensing it to IBM — an agreement that would enable the proliferation of PC clones and make Microsoft's fortune. Windows 1.0 shipped in 1985, Windows 95 in 1995 brought the mainstream graphical interface, and the Office suite, installed across corporations, consolidated the group's dominance. Microsoft went public in 1986 and by the late 1990s was the most valuable company in the world. Gates had to face a high-profile antitrust case from the US Department of Justice in 1998, settled by a compromise in 2001. He stepped down as chief executive in 2000 and as chairman in 2014, turning to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, created in 2000 and endowed with tens of billions of dollars, focused on polio, malaria and maternal health. A central figure of the personal-computing period traced on this site, he embodies the shift from computer as military or academic artefact to everyday desktop object ; his constant rival Steve Jobs, his cultural successor Mark Zuckerberg and the free-software world popularised by Linus Torvalds together form the fabric of the 1980s to 2000s.