Search This Blog

Monday 23 March 2015

Bill Gates

William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is of British and German ancestry. His father was a lawyer and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way. His parents wanted him to be a lawyer.


The private school Bill Gates attended as a child was one of the only schools in the U.S. with a computer.

Gates started going, at the age of 13, to Lakeside High School in Seattle. He wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. Gates modified the code so that he was placed in classes with "a disproportionate number of interesting girls."

During their time tat middle-school, Bill Gates and Paul Allen had their computer privileges revoked for taking advantage of software glitches to obtain free computer time from the company that provided the computers. They were allowed back in the computer lab when they offered to debug the program.

At  the age 17, Gates formed a venture with Paul Allen, called Traf-O-Data. The business created machines based on the Intel 8008 processor that recorded the number of cars passing a given point on a road.

In early 1973, Bill Gates served as a congressional page in the US House of Representatives.

Gates was a freshman at Harvard University in 1973. He dropped out seeing an opportunity to transform the personal computer, which used to be a hard-to-use and expensive device. Gates saw that computers could be cheaper and more easy to use. He started Microsoft with this purpose on April 4, 1975 with Paul Allen.

Harvard professor Christos Papadimitriou who had worked with Bill Gates called him shortly after he had left to start Microsoft. The professor recalled  in a publication of the Association for Computing Machinery, "He had moved to Albuquerque... to run a small company writing code for microprocessors, of all things. I remember thinking: 'Such a brilliant kid. What a waste.'"

Microsoft made $16,005 in revenue in its first year of operation.

Bill Gates was arrested for a traffic violation in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1977. He was driving his Porsche extremely fast and over the speed limit.

Mugshots of 22-year-old Gates following his 1977 arrest for a traffic violation 

In 1981 Bill Gates declared that "640k ought to be enough for anybody."

Bill Gates' idea of a splurge was a used Porsche 911 after Microsoft went public that made him worth over $350 million before the age of 30.

Bill Gates told his university professors that he’d be a millionaire by the age of 30 - He became a billionaire by the age of 31.

Bill Gates married Melinda French in a private ceremony held in Lanai, Hawaii on January 1, 1994. Gates rented out every hotel room on the island of Lanai, and chartered all nearby helicopters to not fly for the day for his wedding.

Bill and Melinda Gates in June 2009

They have three children: Jennifer Katharine (born 1996), Rory John (born 1999), and Phoebe Adele (born 2002).

Gates and Melinda refused to give their three children mobile phones until they turned 14.

Bill Gates continued to fly coach until 1997, when his net worth was already US$36 billion.

Gates stepped down as chief executive officer of Microsoft on January 13, 2000. He remained as chairman and created the position of chief software architect for himself.

In June 2006, Gates announced that he would be transitioning from full-time work at Microsoft to part-time work, Instead he would be devoting most of his time to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. His last full-time day at Microsoft was June 27, 2008.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has given several billion dollars to various charitable and educational projects.

Gates stepped down as chairman of Microsoft in February 2014, taking on a new post as technology adviser to support newly appointed CEO Satya Nadella.

Bill Gates in June 2015

Bill Gates is an avid reader. According to him, he reads 50 books a year - that's close to a book every week.

He enjoys playing golf and bridge.

Gates was so addicted to Minesweeper, he used to sneak into a colleague's office after work to play.

Bill Gates' 66,000-square-foot estate in Medina, Washington is nicknamed "Xanadu 2.0." The huge property has a private beach, a 60-foot pool with an underwater sound system and a trampoline room.

Bill Gates' house was designed using a Apple Mac computer.

Bill Gates owns a small investment firm which has the sole purpose of selling off shares of his Microsoft stocks on a daily basis and investing the profits in a tiny portfolio of high performance non-tech companies.

He has been the richest man in the world consistently every year since 1998—excluding a few brief periods post-2008.

His personal wealth exceeds that of some third-world countries.

Bill Gates is so rich that the average American spending $1 is similar to him spending $1.06 million.

Leonado da Vinci's Codex Hammer was purchased for $30,802,500  by Bill Gates; Three years later he released a digital version of the diary for everyone.

Bill and Melinda Gates made a site that provides free textbooks for college students 100% legally.

Bill Gates has a McDonald's Gold Card for unlimited free fast food.

Source Wikipedia

No comments:

Post a Comment