Bill Gates

William Henry Gates III was born on November, the 28^th in 1955 in Seattle (USA). He is a pioneer in computing. In 1973, Gates joined Harvard University at the age of 18 but soon he stopped his studies to do only computer programming. There he met Paul Allen.

In 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen made the first personnal computer sold to hobbyists,(to the public) the Altair 8800. This creation made them known and they could create the Microcomputer Software company, which became Micro-Soft (Then the hyphen disappeared) with money they had earn with the Altair 8800.

Years after, they created the operating system Windows, which became a few months later the only operating system on computers.

Microsoft is known all around the world thanks to it ability to evolve his operating system into many utilities like word processing, spreadsheet, database and games. In 2001, the Xbox was released and it was a real success.

In 1986, on a winter day, Microsoft entered in Exchange. The same day, Bill Gates became a billionaire. From 1996 to 2009, he was the richest man in the world.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett launched in July 2010 the "Giving Pledge" campaign ("Promise Grant") to encourage billionaires to give at least half of their wealth to charity. The group has sixty members in 2011 all living in the United States. 

Can you answer these two questions?

- What does Microsoft stands for ?

- ​What's the name of the first personnal computer ?

 

Written by Nassim