[...]

GeekWire: Your dad [...] helped take public Physio-Control [in 1971]. He seemed to evolve into being involved with the Washington Research Foundation, Tech Alliance. How would you characterize his role in promoting and fostering the development of the tech industry in the Northwest — aside from yourself?

Bill Gates: He got into a lot of those things primarily through his connection with the University of Washington, and wanting the university to be strong and help drive the success of the community. He realized the university played an absolutely central role in whether the jobs coming in related to the new sciences, including biology and IT-type stuff. It was really through the UW that he got involved in the Tech Alliance. They went down and toured Silicon Valley, went to Boston, went to North Carolina, tried to figure out what state policies, including the role of the university, was in doing those things. Can you attribute it to the Tech Alliance or Microsoft being here or a variety of factors? Seattle is certainly doing well at tech jobs at the moment. Some people think too well.

GeekWire: How important do you think his role was in all of it? He seems like someone who really connects dots, connects people, has this longer vision and orchestrates moving people together to facilitate.

Bill Gates: Yes, in a broad sense, yes. But my dad’s not a technology person. … He was about, “How was this a great community to live in? How is it educating students really well?” He was involved in the Municipal League. He put more time into bar stuff [for the Seattle-King County Bar Association and the Washington State Bar Association]. He did so many different volunteer things, it’s hard to categorize. The bar was certainly the biggest single thing he did. He had a lot of stuff about judicial reform and malpractice insurance for lawyers.

[...]

He came from Bremerton. Unlike my mother’s parents, who were quite well off — that grandfather was a banker who had done quite well — that grandfather had only gone to sixth grade, and owned a small furniture store. He sold it before [World War II], so that when it actually did well he was just working there. His parents, although his mom was very sharp, weren’t all that highly educated. In Bremerton, he met Dorm Braman [Gates Sr.’s Boy Scout Troop leader] and a bunch of people who activated his ambition and capability.

He came to the UW, went to war and came back to law school. There is a whole group of friends, of which [former three-time governor and U.S. Senator for Washington] Dan Evans was part… Various people who out of this small group of friends would go on to all do pretty high-visibility and high-impact stuff. Those were the friends who were coming to our house when I was young, a great group of people.

My dad expanded his horizons way beyond what he grew up with. That grandfather liked to watch the boxing matches. That was the main TV show he was interested in. And all my grandparents were strict Christian Scientists [a religious movement founded by Mary Baker Eddy in the 19th Century that believes in the power of prayer over medicine for healing the sick]. [...] Both my parents choose not to follow the strict, like no doctors, approach to things. In fact, my mom’s father died of cancer in incredible pain and never saw a doctor. Ever. It’s unusual that they were both Christian Scientists, they were from very different parts, very different backgrounds.

GeekWire: Does your dad have any traits that you would like to develop more in yourself?

Bill Gates: Yeah, I say in his book [“Showing Up for Life: Thoughts on the Gifts of a Lifetime”] “My dad is a little more cautious, wise.” Not as over-the-top quite so quickly. There’s a lot about my dad that I and others would love to have come more naturally. My dad is very good about how he makes things about the success of the activity, and not putting himself at the center of it… He chose not to run for political office. There was a time he considered being a federal judge. Actually, when that opportunity came along, his law firm was in a situation where he decided he wouldn’t do it. He really couldn’t leave the law firm at that point. I always thought he would be such a great judge. He shows no signs of regret because he passed that opportunity…. His law firm career went extremely well. But I think of him like a judge.

GeekWire: Talking to people for the profile of your dad, the accolades are just boundless. Is there any weakness that he has? Or anything he did where he might have said, “I wished I would have done that differently or better, or I could have been more effective somehow?”

Bill Gates: Well, my dad worked very hard when I was young. There was a pretty strong imbalance between the level of engagement that we had with my mother, who was also very successful and active. Libby, my younger sister, is nine years younger than I am. That is when women were being put on boards. So mom ended up on the board of the insurance company, the phone company, the university, and the bank. All these boards.

When I was young, my mom was busy, but not super busy. So my dad has shown some regret that he was so engaged in his work, that he let her do a lot of the communication. In fact, if dad was unhappy about something that was really unusual. Therefore, it was unquestionably something you better pay attention to…. [At the dinner table, my parents] were very good about talking about the work they were doing, which you can say that was centered on them. [...]

My two grandmothers, not to insult my grandfathers, were significantly more talented than my grandfathers… My two grandmothers were both very smart. His mother hadn’t much education; I think she went to eighth grade or something. His father only went to sixth grade. She was smart. She was the one who would read the Christian Science lesson daily. Every morning, you would read this Mary Baker Eddy lesson. I don’t know if my grandfather could have read it. She would always be the one who sat there and made a coffee and read the lesson. That was the first thing they did when I would go over and stay at their house in downtown Bremerton. He had his mother who was very sharp. He had a sister who didn’t get to go to college, which he felt kind of bad about because she actually helped support him.

Then my mom was very capable. It is hard to compare my mom and dad, because they were both ambitious and both very smart. My mom was even more sociable, even more of a people-person than my dad. She was a very energetic person. So he had that experience… Certainly, the expectations were for my sisters to go to college or to be good at anything. My older sister worked as much as I did. Libby chose a little less, but she had a great college education. Did a lot of serious work for a period of time. Dad is pretty even-handed about those things….

In 2010, Gates Sr. helped lead the campaign for Initiative 1098, a ballot measure to create a state income tax for Washington, which is recognized as having one of the least fair tax systems in the country because it puts a heavier burden on low-income residents than the affluent. I-1098 would have brought more balance to the system. Despite the efforts of Gates and others — including a TV ad in which Gates Sr. gets dumped in a dunk tank — the measure failed. Among the opposition were some of Gates Sr.’s friends, including Steve Ballmer, who replaced Gates Jr. as CEO of Microsoft, venture capitalist Tom Alberg and former governor Dan Evans.

[...]

Bill Gates: My dad has a well-developed sense of justice. He decided there should be an income tax. Based on the voters, not that many people agreed with him. But he had a firm conviction about that and he thought a lot of people would come along and support him. Even as that coalition ended up being quite small compared to what he hoped for, he stuck with it. Next thing you know, my dad is in these ads where he is being dunked in the tank. What was my dad at the time, 78 or something like that? I was like, “Come on, dad.”

It was like when he took the UW [Creating Futures] Campaign. First, he was reluctant, then he decided to do it. I said to him, “How come you don’t have a co-chair?” I don’t think anyone’s been a single head of a campaign before or since my dad did it that way. It’s not to say he didn’t get lots of help. He has a network of people who help him with things. But he chose to at least have that top spot by himself, which ended up being a massive amount of work. And thank goodness, unlike the income-tax thing, that one was, in the end, quite successful. [The eight-year effort led by Gates Sr. raised nearly $2.7 billion.]

GeekWire: Do you ask your dad for advice with business?

Bill Gates: Sure. He has been helpful many times. Not about the specifics of Microsoft, because we have a lot of technology things. We had a legal dispute early in Microsoft [in which the government alleged the company was engaged in noncompetitive practices] where I felt sure we were right and we ought to stay the course. He helped reinforced that. That was good. My dad is wise, and so I have run things by him. Not software strategy, but decisions.

My parents created a really strong social environment. When new people would come in to work for Microsoft, my mom and dad would often have them over. I figured if they were well older than me, they did a better job at connecting them into the community and who they might want to get to know or what groups they might want to be a part of. I was mono-maniacally focused on Microsoft and quite a bit younger than some of these experienced people we were bringing in.

Even when I wanted to hire Steve Ballmer, to drop out of business school, he was a year in, my parents had him over and were helpful. They knew when I was trying to hire somebody and thought about how they could help. When somebody new was starting, that they could help embrace them.

GeekWire: So was it hard when Steve came out against the income tax, after your dad brings him into the fold?

Bill Gates: It is now just a friendly joke. When Dan Evans came out against it, I was like, “Oh, dad” because Dan is a super liberal Republican. He didn’t like that particular form of the income tax. It is an interesting thing [how to implement an income tax]. Do you start [taxing] at the high end, and that’s a Trojan Horse for doing it broadly, or do you just do it for the high-end [income earners]? Anyway, lots of people have different opinions.

People who pay high incomes in this state, their employees pay less in taxes than in other states. When you are trying to hire somebody who is thinking about going to California or Washington, it is a benefit to this state. When a company has to balance the benefit they get from that versus what it means for the state not having enough revenue to do its job, it’s a tough decision. Steve came down one way on that. I am super close friends with Steve. That was fine, that was his judgment, that is what he chose to do. If [the measure had lost] 51 percent to 49 percent, I could say, “That was it, Steve.” [Given that I-1098 failed 64 to 36 percent] it’s not like that was some definitive moment in my dad’s quest for the truly-just income tax.

Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, on October 28, 1955. [...] His ancestry includes English, German, and Irish/Scots-Irish.[20] His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way of America. Gates's maternal grandfather was J. W. Maxwell, a national bank president. Gates 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.[21][22] 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.[23]

Early in his life, Gates observed that his parents wanted him to pursue a law career.[24] When he was young, his family regularly attended a church of the Congregational Christian Churches, a Protestant Reformed denomination.[25][26][27] Gates was small for his age and was bullied as a child.[22] [...]

GeekWire: Your dad was involved with early tech businesses like Physio-Control, Intermec and SeaMED. What interested him? Where did he find his fascination with innovation and technology?

Bill Gates: Well, his law firm got involved in those. Actually, as a sixth grader he had me go down and meet with Dr. Edmark and Hunter Simpson. I wrote a long report about Physio-Control. Intermec, they did a tape reader. The original Traf-O-Data tape reader I got some guys at Intermec to build. My dad had a mix… He had quite a variety of clients including those. I wouldn’t say it was all heavy science or engineering.

[Bill Gates Sr.’] early legal clients included Redmond’s Physio-Control Co., a pioneer in heart defibrillators led by Dr. Karl William Edmark, and Intermec Corp., an Everett-based business and creator of the most widely used barcode symbols and the hand-held barcode scanner. Gates was on the board of directors for both companies.

Gates helped take Physio-Control public in 1971 — the same year that drivers on SeaTac’s stretch of Highway 99 were confronted by an infamous billboard asking “Will the last person leaving SEATTLE — Turn out the lights” erected in response to a spate of layoffs at Boeing, then the region’s largest employer. It was also four years before Gates Jr. and Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft, a company that would eventually reshape the Seattle region and the larger tech ecosystem.

The success of Physio-Control was “the beginning of that positive feedback of people starting a technology company and doing well and going on to found new companies, and to serve as an angel investor to others,” said Malarkey, of the Technology Alliance.

The angel investing of Gates Sr. and his peers, she said, had “a spirit of community building.”

And his dad’s engagement in tech ventures helped fan his son’s curiosity about the field.

“As a sixth grader [meaning.. Bill Gates is about age 11, and this is about 1967...], he had me go down and meet with Dr. Edmark and [Physio’s president and CEO] Hunter Simpson, and I wrote a long report about Physio-Control,” Gates Jr. said. Gates later worked with some employees at Intermec to develop the tape reader that he and Allen used at Traf-O-Data, their pre-Microsoft venture created to analyze traffic-counting data.

[...] : Also while being a student, Gates got inspired of the philanthropic work of John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. In 2000, Gates together with his wife Melinda founded Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support low-income countries.

Could you tell us about the role of the Lakeside School Mother's Club in introducing you to computers?

Bill Gates: The Lakeside's Mother's Club had a rummage sale every year to raise money for the school. And instead of just funding the budget, they always would fund something kind of new and interesting in addition. And without too much understanding, they decided having a computer terminal at the school would be a novel thing. It was a teletype -- upper case only, ten characters a second -- and you had to share a phone line to call into a big time-sharing computer that was very expensive. When you were connected up it would charge, and then when you actually had a program running it would charge a lot more. So they set up this teletype, and some of the math and science teachers played around with it. One of them accidentally spent a lot of money with an infinite loop program. They spent like $200 by surprise. So they were a bit intimidated, and a bunch of us kind of hung out there and tried out different things. The programming language was BASIC, which was quite novel at the time. It had been invented by some Dartmouth professors. So that was the first computer language I learned, and I wrote increasingly complex programs. So that eighth grade exposure was a pretty neat thing, even though the machine we were working on was quite limited.

Even most colleges didn't have one of those at that time.

Bill Gates: No, the idea of students playing around with a computer was very unusual at the time. In fact, that computer -- eventually the costs were high enough they took it away. But then some other computer companies had come around, including one in Seattle, that a bunch of us went down and volunteered to help out and do some work for. So from that point on we always managed -- although it was dicey at times -- to find access to computers. That was very unusual in high school. But it took a lot of initiative on our part to get those experiences, but we wouldn't have done it if we hadn't had that early eighth grade exposure.

[...]

To someone who's never done any programming, can you describe what made it so exciting to you at the beginning?

Bill Gates: Well, programming is where you're describing to the machine how to do something-- telling it how to play tic-tac-toe, telling it how to play the board game Monopoly, telling it how to convert numbers from one base to another. There are these simple instructions, but if you put them together you can synthesize something quite complex. It's a fascinating kind of mathematical thing. How can you make it fast? How can you make it small?

I went through several phases of doing more complex programs where people who were great programmers would look at my work, give me feedback on it, and you get so you can be quite a good programmer. It was kind such an intense activity, between the age of 13 and 17, that we learned a lot. Eventually one of the programs we took on was the idea of the scheduling of our school. When should the classes meet? Who should be in what section? You have all these requests for people who want different classes, and keeping them small, and not having the teachers teach too many classes in a row -- very complex kind of software problem. And actually, when the school first asked me to do it when I was 15, I said that I didn't know how and they asked some adults to do it, and that didn't work. Then, about a year later, I'd figured out how to do it, and so my friends and I actually did the software that did all this high school scheduling. It had some fantastic benefits to us, and we got paid for doing it. It was exactly the kind of complex problem that developed my skills very well. And we got some degree of control over who was in our classes, so it combined the best of everything!

We've read that at one point your fellow members of the computer club at Lakeside kicked you out. Is that true?

Bill Gates: Yeah. Initially, when that teletype showed up, there were probably 20 kids who showed an interest. It was confusing enough that it got whittled down to about eight or nine fairly quickly who were quite serious about it. Then there were about four of us who were hyper-serious, doing it day and night. Two of them were two years older than I was, and one was my same age. Now in a high school, people that are two years ahead of you, they don't socialize with the young kids all that much. So the idea that we had this group, the four of us, was kind of unusual. We called it the Lakeside Programming Group. One of the companies we had been doing work for went bankrupt, the one in Seattle, and so we went to one in Portland, Oregon.

Was that C Cubed?

Bill Gates: Yes, Computer Center Corporation -- C Cubed -- which had been in the University District in Seattle. We'd spent a lot of time there, and they were wonderful to us, but they weren't a well run business, so they went bankrupt. This company down in Portland, Oregon said, "Hey, we're not just going to give you computer time, you have to do something." So we agreed to write this payroll program. And a payroll program is surprisingly complicated. There's all these taxes and reports and things at the state level and federal level. Anyway, they said, "Well, if you could write one of those, we'd at least give you free computer time." So I negotiated that deal, and the two older members -- Paul Allen and Rick -- said, "There's not enough work to go around, so we're going to take charge of this." And I said, "Okay, I'm not that interested," because I had in mind how I wanted to do the payroll program. So they messed around for about three months, didn't get much done, and then said, "Will you join back up?" And I said, "Okay, but if so, I'm in charge of this," and it's going to kind of set a precedent for future activities. But they said, "No, no. That's fine." And so we worked. We actually finished this payroll program. It was a lot of work. The friend who was my age, Kent Evans, and I ended up doing the lion's share of the work. Now tragically, right as he and I finished that he was killed in a mountain climbing accident. So then there were just three of us left who'd been extremely involved, including Paul Allen, who was the one who was reading the magazines even more than I was. He was the one who actually saw this computer on a chip -- a so-called "microprocessor" -- in a very small obscure article. He saw that it would be deeply important and brought that to me in 1971. So we were still 15 -- I was 15, and he was 17 at the time.

Was it during your work with C Cubed that you got into some trouble for hacking into a system?

Bill Gates: These C Cubed people have this computer, which is a time-sharing computer, and they're letting us come in at night. And they had this deal with the company who made the computer, Digital Equipment Corporation, that they had this acceptance period. If they could find problems with it, they could delay their rental payments. So they thought of us as kind of monkeys that might find some problems and help them delay their rental payments. Well, that was a fair analysis, because at first we were just completely goofing around. Like, we'd try to run hundreds of jobs at the same time, or have all the jobs try and grab the same resources, to see if we could get the system to fail. And we did, in kind of this brute force approach. So they would report that as a problem and delay their rental payment. Well, a few months went by, actually about four months by the end of it. We had gotten very sophisticated. In fact, we'd gotten the source code of the operating system out of the garbage can, and were reading it, and the kind of problems we were finding were far more subtle. In fact, we would not only find the problem, we'd look and we'd suggest how they might fix it. Anyway, Digital Equipment got so tired of this they said, "Look, you've got to pay. You're going to be able to find these kinds of problems forever, but we need to get paid." So then there was a question whether they would let us stay there or not, and it was pretty tenuous. So Paul and I, we understood the system well enough that we could look at all the passwords of the various accounts, so we would use literally any account. And then, people -- when they found out we had done that, they got kind of mad about that. They weren't sure how mad they should be about it, because we hadn't really caused any damage, but it wasn't a good thing. Computer hacking was literally just being invented at the time, and so fortunately we got off with a bit of a warning. But there actually was a period that, because of that, they said we weren't supposed to use the computer. It was over a summer, and Paul actually went up to the University of Washington and found ways to use the computer and get connected up. He took a while before he told me and then eventually he told me about that and we got back on.

[...] What about school in general? You were a great reader. Otherwise, what kind of a student were you?

Bill Gates: Well, through eighth grade I was sort of enjoying the fact that I could do reasonably well without any effort. They had this thing where you'd get an "effort: which would be one, two or three, and then a grade. And so the ideal I always wanted was an A3, where you had the least effort, but the greatest grade. So my grades weren't all that great. And then in eighth grade I had been at a private school for a couple of years [suggests Gates started at Lakeside during his 6th grade] and decided that I better start getting good grades, both in terms of having some freedom, the way I'd be treated, and thinking about college. So from ninth grade on, I had a reasonably spotless grade record. I got quite serious about grades at that point.

Were you always good at math?

Bill Gates: Math was the thing that came most natural to me. And you know you'd take these exams, some of which were sort of nationwide exams, and I did quite well on those. That gave me some confidence, and I had some teachers who were very encouraging. They let me read textbooks, they encouraged me to take a college course on symbolic math, which is actually called algebra. So I felt pretty confident in my math skills, which is a nice thing, because not only the sciences, but economics, a lot of things if you're comfortable with math and statistics and ways of looking at cause and effect, that's extremely helpful.

Do any particular math teachers come to mind from that era?

Bill Gates: I had one named Paul Stockland at the school who challenged me. Later one named Fred Wright who challenged me. I actually majored in math for the time I was at college, because it's a very interesting topic. [...] 🌍

During the 1967/68 school year , the [Lakeside School] teaching staff recommended acquisition of computer facilities to expose the students to the technology . The school could not afford to purchase a computer . However the Lakeside Mothers Club agreed to finance the use of a time sharing service . In 1968 the school obtained an ASR-33 Teletype terminal and used a local access line to dial into a General Electric Mark II time sharing system .

[...] In 1968, [the Lakeside] school administration decided to buy a computer time from the General Electric Company. At that time, the system based on DEC PDP-10 micro-architecture was a basis on the market. Later, he said: “When I was thirteen, my school (Lakeside School) installed a teletype machine. From that point on, my friends and I spent most of our free time writing programs and figuring out how to make the computer to do interesting things.” The school administration had underestimated its students – the whole year of the computer time was used in a few weeks. Fortunately, a new student arrived in Lakeside, whose father worked as a senior programmer in Computer Center Corporation (CCC). The new contract allowed Gates and his friends to continue their experiments.

Young hackers quickly figured out the intricacies of the machine, found the weaknesses and started causing trouble – they broke the defense, which on several occasions led to a system failure and changed the files that contained records of computer time. CCC noticed that breach, and set them aside from working with computers for a few weeks.

Meanwhile, the company’s business began to suffer from constant failures and poor protection. Remembering the destructive activities of computer users from Lakeside, CCC invited Bill Gates and his friends to identify flaws and security holes. As a payment, the company offered endless computer time for young hackers. Sure thing, Bill and his friends could not refuse. Since that day boys couldn’t say if it was a day or night outside – they were hanging out in the lab all the time. For instance, one project of Gates was a program for scheduling classes. ‘Somehow’, it constantly redefined Bill to the classes with the prettiest girls. In addition to troubleshooting, they studied each material on automated calculations and improved their skills. [...]

In the words of narrator Paul Allen:

[...] My honors-geometry teacher [at my high school in Seattle ... Lakeside... ] was Bill Dougall, the head of Lakeside’s science and math departments. A navy pilot in World War II, Mr. Dougall had an advanced degree in aeronautical engineering, and another in French literature from the Sorbonne. In our school’s best tradition, he believed that book study wasn’t enough without real-world experience. He also realized that we’d need to know something about computers when we got to college. A few high schools were beginning to train students on traditional mainframes, but Mr. Dougall wanted something more engaging for us. In 1968 he approached the Lakeside Mothers Club, which agreed to use the proceeds from its annual rummage sale to lease a teleprinter terminal for computer time-sharing, a brand-new business at the time.

On my way to math class in McAllister Hall, I stopped by for a look. As I approached the small room, the faint clacking got louder. I opened the door and found three boys squeezed inside. There was a bookcase and a worktable with piles of manuals, scraps from notebooks, and rolled-up fragments of yellow paper tape. The students were clustered around an overgrown electric typewriter, mounted on an aluminum-footed pedestal base: a Teletype Model ASR-33 (for Automatic Send and Receive). It was linked to a GE-635, a General Electric mainframe computer in a distant, unknown office.

The Teletype made a terrific racket, a mix of low humming, the Gatling gun of the paper-tape punch, and the ka-chacko-whack of the printer keys. The room’s walls and ceiling were lined with white corkboard for soundproofing. But though it was noisy and slow, a dumb remote terminal with no display screen or lowercase letters, the ASR-33 was also state-of- the-art. I was transfixed. I sensed that you could do things with this machine.

That year, 1968, would be a watershed in matters digital. In March, Hewlett-Packard introduced the first programmable desktop calculator. In June, Robert Dennard won a patent for a one-transistor cell of dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, a new and cheaper method of temporary data storage. In July, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore co-founded Intel Corporation. In December, at the legendary “mother of all demos” in San Francisco, the Stanford Research Institute’s Douglas Engelbart showed off his original versions of a mouse, a word processor, e-mail, and hypertext. Of all the epochal changes in store over the next two decades, a remarkable number were seeded over those 10 months: cheap and reliable memory, a graphical user interface, a “killer” application, and more.

It’s hard to convey the excitement I felt when I sat down at the Teletype. With my program written out on notebook paper, I’d type it in on the keyboard with the paper-tape punch turned on. Then I’d dial into the G.E. computer, wait for a beep, log on with the school’s password, and hit the Start button to feed the paper tape through the reader, which took several minutes.

At last came the big moment. I’d type “RUN,” and soon my results printed out at 10 characters per second—a glacial pace next to today’s laser printers, but exhilarating at the time. It would be quickly apparent whether my program worked; if not, I’d get an error message. In either case, I’d quickly log off to save money. Then I’d fix any mistakes by advancing the paper tape to the error and correcting it on the keyboard while simultaneously punching a new tape—a delicate maneuver nowadays handled by a simple click of a mouse and a keystroke. When I achieved a working program, I’d secure it with a rubber band and stow it on a shelf.

Soon I was spending every lunchtime and free period around the Teletype with my fellow aficionados. Others might have found us eccentric, but I didn’t care. I had discovered my calling. I was a programmer.

When you were growing up, did you have any vision of what you wanted to accomplish?

Bill Gates: When I was very young I hadn't been exposed to computers so I was mostly just reading, doing math, learning about science, and I wasn't sure what my career would be. I knew I loved learning about things. I was an avid reader, but it was when I was 12 years old that I first got to use a computer, actually a very limited machine by today's standards. But that definitely fascinated me when I was first exposed.

Love at first sight?

Bill Gates: I was intrigued by figuring out what it could do and what it couldn't do. And some friends and I spent lots of time. The teachers got intimidated so we were on our own trying to figure it out. Actually, we gave a course on computers to the other students, and it became a fascination, where we got paid for doing computer work and talked about forming a company. But there was kind of a magical breakthrough when the computer became cheap, and we could see that everyone could afford a computer. That was much later, but that's what got us to really get together and create a company for software.

In the words of narrator Paul Allen:

[...] One day early that fall [of 1968], I saw a gangly, freckle-faced eighth-grader edging his way into the crowd around the Teletype, all arms and legs and nervous energy. He had a scruffy-preppy look: pullover sweater, tan slacks, enormous saddle shoes. His blond hair went all over the place. You could tell three things about Bill Gates pretty quickly. He was really smart. He was really competitive; he wanted to show you how smart he was. And he was really, really persistent. After that first time, he kept coming back. Many times he and I would be the only ones there.

Bill came from a family that was prominent even by Lakeside standards; his father later served as president of the state bar association. I remember the first time I went to Bill’s big house, a block or so above Lake Washington, feeling a little awed. His parents subscribed to Fortune, and Bill read it religiously. One day he showed me the magazine’s special annual issue and asked me, “What do you think it’s like to run a Fortune 500 company?” I said I had no idea. And Bill said, “Maybe we’ll have our own company someday.” He was 13 years old and already a budding entrepreneur.

Where I was curious to study everything in sight, Bill would focus on one task at a time with total discipline. You could see it when he programmed—he’d sit with a marker clenched in his mouth, tapping his feet and rocking, impervious to distraction. He had a unique way of typing, sort of a six-finger, sideways scrabble. There’s a famous photograph of Bill and me in the computer room not long after we first met. I’m seated on a hard-back chair at the teleprinter in my dapper green corduroy jacket and turtleneck. Bill is standing to my side in a plaid shirt, his head cocked attentively, eyes trained on the printer as I type. He looks even younger than he actually was. I look like an older brother, which was something Bill didn’t have.

[...] In 1969, at the Computer Center Corporation experienced difficulties once again, and in 1970, it declared itself a bankrupt. The Lakeside’s students lost their job and access to computer time. Paul Allen’s father was working at the University of Washington and had an access to the computer center. Young programmers got down to business looking for an area where to apply their knowledge. In 1971, the Information Sciences hired Bill Gates and Paul Allen to create software that would be make-up payroll sheet. In addition to unlimited computer time employers have agreed to pay the developers every time their software will bring the company profit.

Traf-o-Data - The young programmers regularly received orders. Bill Gates was the initiator who said: “Let’s call the real world, and sell it something.” And the most interesting thing that he did find clients and sold them his software. For example, once he developed software to optimize road traffic and sold it for $20,000 dollars. He was only 15 years old!

In the words of narrator Paul Allen:

One evening after school, early in my senior year at Lakeside, [which would be the fall of 1970, ] I brazenly walked through a door and into UW’s graduate computer science lab. I picked up a manual and took my seat at a Teletype linked to a Xerox Data Systems Sigma- 5, which I soon had figured out. Then a grad student approached to ask a question, and word got around that I seemed to know what I was doing. I was rolling along until an assistant professor called me into his office and said, “You don’t look familiar. Are you in any of my classes?”

And I said, “No, sir, I’m not.”

“As matter of fact, you’re not even enrolled here, are you?” I confessed that I wasn’t. The professor smiled and said, “All right,

I’ll tell you what. If you keep helping my students, you can stick around.”

There was no turning back after that. I moved on to the Burroughs B5500 and a powerful language called ALGOL— my first brush with batch processing, a step backward in time that only deepened my appreciation of the PDP-10. I tried my hand at a Control Data CDC- 6400 and an Imlac PDS- 1, the pioneering graphical minicomputer, where I found a version of Steve Russell’s Spacewar. I was a sponge, soaking up knowledge wherever I could. All of us were sponges then.

That November [of 1970], a Portland time- sharing company called Information Services Inc. invited me and my three “colleagues” to meet to discuss a contract, a big step for us. Before driving to Oregon, we reconstituted ourselves as the Lakeside Programming Group, which sounded grown- up and official. ISI wanted a payroll program that had to be written in COBOL, a high- level language used in business applications. In return, they would credit us with free time on their PDP- 10. We outlined our experience and submitted our résumés; Bill, just turned sixteen, had written his in pencil on lined notebook paper. We got the job.

The following year[, which would be 1971], 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.

In the words of narrator Paul Allen:

"OVER CHRISTMAS, Bill [Gates] got a call from Bud Pembroke, the guy who’d hired us to do the ISI payroll program. A massive software project for the Bonneville Power Administration’s electrical grid was behind schedule, and Bud was scouring the region for programmers who knew their way around a PDP- 10. I was not quite twenty and Bill was only seventeen, but age was not a criterion. “And you’re going to be on salary,” Bud said.

Bill said, “How much?”

And Bud said, “One hundred sixty- five dollars a week.”

Four dollars an hour was a pittance for an experienced programmer, even then, but Bill and I couldn’t believe our good fortune. Here was a chance to work together again on a PDP- 10, and for pay! I was glad to take a leave of absence from Washington State. Bill had completed his required courses at Lakeside and got approval to pursue an off-campus senior project for his final semester. We told Bud to count us in.

Bill and I piled into his orange 1967 Mustang convertible and drove south to Vancouver, Washington, a land of strip malls, car washes, and a vintage A&W Root Beer drive- in stand where we’d become regulars. We found a cheap two- bedroom apartment and showed up for work on a Monday in January 1973.

" enrolled at Harvard College in the autumn of 1973. He chose a pre-law major but took mathematics and graduate level computer science courses. While at Harvard, he met fellow student Steve Ballmer. [Ballmer] graduated magna cum laude. Years later, Ballmer succeeded Gates as Microsoft's CEO and maintained that position from 2000 until his resignation in 2014." ( Wikipedia - Saved Aug 10 2020 : [HK002A][GDrive] )

[Bill Gates] lived in Currier House, an outpost full of math and science whizzes removed from the more centrally located dorms along the Charles River. In his sophomore year, dormmate Jeff Clark introduced him to Ballmer, who was also living in Currier House. "Jeff liked Steve because Steve had this very energetic approach to being involved in everything," Gates says. "And he kind of liked me because I had this very energetic approach to not being involved in things."

Ballmer compensated for his shyness by becoming hyperactive on campus. He would become manager of the Harvard football team, business manager of the Harvard Crimson and publisher of a campus literary magazine. He made a point of memorizing faces and names from the Harvard directory.

He and Gates became friends, attending a double feature of "Singin' in the Rain" and "A Clockwork Orange" that November. The next month, Gates left the door to his dorm room wide open after he returned to Seattle for the holidays; because dormmates hung out in Gates's room, he never locked the door. Ballmer, seeing his friend's wallet sitting in full view on his dresser, locked up after him.

Both got perfect scores on their math SATs and shared an interest in Napoleon. They were both slobs, dormmates recall. Gates eschewed sheets, opting to sleep directly on his mattress because it was too much trouble to make his bed. Gary Kollin, who briefly shared an apartment with Ballmer one summer, says Ballmer did the same -- his sheets were the wrong size for his mattress, and he thought it would be a waste of money to buy new ones for the summer.

Ballmer helped nudge Gates into doing social things, persuading him to join Harvard's all-male Fox Club. But each had his own interests and circles: Ballmer had his extracurriculars; Gates spent hours playing poker with dormmates. The poker games went all night, and often badly for Gates.

"We used to rub our hands together when he'd sit down," poker player Scott Drill says. "We'd say, 'Here comes the Bill Gates Gravy Train.' " Gates had an obsessive willingness to keep playing, even after his losses reached into the hundreds. One night, he walked into Ballmer's room and handed him his checkbook. "Hide this," he said to Ballmer, one poker player recalls. "I don't want to lose anymore."

Neither required much sleep, and friends recall them engaging in animated debates late into the night. Ballmer even adopted Gates's rocking habit, seemingly unconsciously. Together they studied until dawn several days in a row for an economics final. "We're screwed in this class . . . no, we're golden," Ballmer would yell late at night, according to other students. Gates scored a 99 on the test, Ballmer a 97.

Through the spring semester of 1974, Bill kept urging me to move to Boston. We could find work together as programmers, he said; some local firms sounded interested. We’d come up with some exciting project. In any case, we’d have fun. Why not give it a try?

Drifting at Washington State, I was ready to take a flier. I mailed my résumé to a dozen computer companies in the Boston area and got a $12,500 job offer from Honeywell. If Boston didn’t work out, I could always return to school. In the meantime, I’d sample a new part of the country, and my girlfriend, Rita, had agreed to join me. We had grown more serious and wanted to live together as a trial run for marriage. Plus, Bill would be there. At a minimum, we could put our heads together on the weekends.

Bill Gates : "In the meantime[, upon graduating High school and then starting at college,] I start at Harvard University back in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Paul's at Washington State, another place, so I help him get a job out there in the Boston area, and we're just brainstorming, you know, "What's going to happen with the microprocessor?""

[...] A glimpse of his resume from 1974, when he was 18, reveals that during his first year at Harvard, Gates was already making $15,000.

In today’s dollars, that’s almost $75,000, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator. Impressive for a college freshman.

Though it’s not clear from where that income came, the resume says that he and future Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen (today worth more than $20 billion) were working “in partnership” and had designed a program for an early Intel computer.

The CV also shows Gates worked as a programmer at TRW Systems Group in Vancouver, a developer of military and civil space systems (which was acquired by Northrop Grumman in 2002).

Both Gates and Allen structured their early resumes similarly. First, they listed computer-related coursework — where Gates points out he received all As in the courses mentioned, like Operating Systems Structure, Data Base Management and Computer Graphics. Next came the computer programming languages in which they were proficient. Finally, came work experience. [...]

Art Salsberg, editorial director of Popular Electronics, was looking for a computer construction project, and his technical editor Les Solomon knew that MITS was working on an Intel 8080-based computer kit. Roberts assured Solomon that the project would be complete by November to meet the press deadline for the January 1975 issue. The first prototype was finished in October and shipped to Popular Electronics in New York for the cover photograph, but it was lost in transit. Solomon already had a number of pictures of the machine, and the article was based on them. Roberts and Yates got to work on building a replacement. The computer on the magazine cover was an empty box with just switches and LEDs on the front panel. The finished Altair computer had a completely different circuit board layout than the prototype shown in the magazine.[26]

Bill Gates: In 1971, there's this obscure article on the microprocessor that Intel has done -- what was called the 4004 -- that Paul said, "Look, this thing's going to keep getting better and it's going to be better than these mini-computers." Mini-computers were like $10,000 to $200,000. Paul and I had borrowed some of those and messed around with those. And Paul said, "No, no. They're going to have something better than the mini-computer that costs like $1,000." [...]

Finally, somebody takes the 8080 chip and creates a kit computer, and [the cover story in Popular Electronics in January 1975 is theAltair 8800?] that comes out in December 1974. So we get that, and that's both exciting -- because finally this thing that we've expected has happened -- but the question is, "Is it happening without us?" And so this company, which is in Albuquerque, New Mexico, we call them up and say, "Hey, we can do software for this machine." And they say, "Oh yeah, sure." So we very quickly work on a BASIC for this computer, which I'm well equipped to do, and Paul had some brilliant ideas about how we'd simulate this machine, because we didn't have one, and that was amazing. So we write this thing and we call them up and we say, "Hey, when you connect a teletype up, what's the software programming to get the characters in to print them? How do you do that?" The so-called "input output." And they thought, "Well, that's interesting. You guys may not be flaky, because actually you're the first one who asked that question," which is, if you're going to really write the software, you eventually have to ask that question.

Ed Roberts (founder of MITS, Inc.) received a letter from Traf-O-Data (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traf-O-Data ) asking if he would be interested in buying its BASIC programming language for the machine. He called the company and reached a private home, where no one had heard of anything like BASIC. In fact the letter had been sent by Bill Gates and Paul Allen from the Boston area, and they had no BASIC yet to offer. When they called Roberts to follow up on the letter he expressed his interest, and the two started work on their BASIC interpreter using a self-made simulator for the 8080 on a PDP-10 minicomputer. They figured they had 30 days before someone else beat them to the punch, [...]

In the words of narrator Paul Allen:

So when the right opportunity surfaced, as it did that December, it got my full attention: an open invitation by the MITS company, in Albuquerque, to build a programming language for their new Altair microcomputer, intended for the hobbyist market.

Some have suggested that our Altair basic was remarkable because we created it without ever seeing an Altair or even a sample Intel 8080, the microprocessor it would run on. What we did was unprecedented, but what is less well understood is that we had no choice. The Altair was little more than a bare-bones box with a C.P.U.-on-a-chip inside. It had no hard drive, no floppy disk, no place to edit or store programs.

We moved into Harvard’s Aiken Computation Lab, on Oxford Street, a one-story concrete building with an under-utilized time-sharing system. The clock was ticking on us from the start. Bill had told Ed Roberts, MITS’S co-founder and C.E.O., that our BASIC was nearly complete, and Ed said he’d like to see it in a month or so, when in point of fact we didn’t even have an 8080 instruction manual.

In building our homegrown basic, we borrowed bits and pieces of our design from previous versions, a long-standing software tradition. Languages evolve; ideas blend together; in computer technology, we all stand on others’ shoulders. As the weeks passed, we got immersed in the mission—as far as we knew, we were building the first native high-level programming language for a microprocessor. Occasionally we wondered if some group at M.I.T. or Stanford might beat us, but we’d quickly regain focus. Could we pull it off? Could we finish this thing and close the deal in Albuquerque? Yeah, we could! We had the energy and the skill, and we were hell-bent on seizing the opportunity.

We worked till all hours, with double shifts on weekends. Bill basically stopped going to class. Monte Davidoff, a Harvard freshman studying advanced math who had joined us, overslept his one-o’clock French section. I neglected my job at Honeywell, dragging into the office at noon. I’d stay until 5:30, and then it was back to Aiken until three or so in the morning. I’d save my files, crash for five or six hours, and start over. We’d break for dinner at Harvard House of Pizza or get the pupu platter at Aku Aku, a local version of Trader Vic’s. I had a weakness for their egg rolls and butterflied shrimp.

I’d occasionally catch Bill grabbing naps at his terminal during our late-nighters. He’d be in the middle of a line of code when he’d gradually tilt forward until his nose touched the keyboard. After dozing for an hour or two, he’d open his eyes, squint at the screen, blink twice, and resume precisely where he’d left off—a prodigious feat of concentration.

Working so closely together, the three of us developed a strong camaraderie. Because our program ran on top of the multi-user TOPS-10 operating system, we could all work simultaneously. We staged nightly competitions to squeeze a sub-routine—a small portion of code within a program that performs a specific task—into the fewest instructions, taking notepads to separate corners of the room and scrawling away. Then someone would say, “I can do it in nine.” And someone else would call out, “Well, I can do it in five!”

A few years ago, when I reminisced with Monte about those days, he compared programming to writing a novel—a good analogy, I thought, for our approach to Altair BASIC. At the beginning we outlined our plot, the conceptual phase of the coding. Then we took the big problem and carved it into its component chapters, from the hundreds of sub-routines to their related data structures, before putting all the parts back together.

In their rush to write BASIC for the Altair, Gates and Allen enlisted a quiet dormmate named Monte Davidoff to write an intricate but crucial part of the software. Davidoff was a shy, middle-class kid from Glendale, Wis. "Sweet, unassuming, really quiet guy," recalls Gary Kollin. By character and circumstance, an unequal partner with Gates.

Davidoff's job was to write a portion of the software that would allow the Altair to perform a greater range of calculations. In Albuquerque, he lived with Gates and Allen in a two-bedroom apartment, sleeping on the living room floor. They became friends, Davidoff says, but Gates rode him hard. "There was definitely a supervisory dynamic," Davidoff says. "Bill could get very loud. If he felt you weren't getting something, he would say the same thing, louder. . . . He liked strong interchanges. I preferred not to work in that way."

Davidoff spent the summers of 1975 and 1977 working for Gates and Allen. They offered him a permanent job with Micro-Soft. Davidoff, whose father co-owned a small Milwaukee hardware store, said no, chiefly because he didn't want to drop out of Harvard. Gates, with family money in reserve, could afford to.

"The way Bill and I thought about money was very different," Davidoff says. "He would tell all of his friends, 'Just call me collect.' He knew he wasn't going to have to support himself coming out of college."

Davidoff graduated from Harvard and went on to a career as a programmer. Now 44, he lives in Cupertino, Calif., where he works as an independent software consultant and pays the astronomical rents of Silicon Valley. He often wonders "what if," but says he's comfortable with his limited role in Microsoft's pre-corporate history.

He has not seen Gates for 23 years, except for two random encounters at industry events in San Jose.

In the words of narrator Paul Allen:

By late February [of 1975], eight weeks after our first contact with MITS, the interpreter (which would save space by executing one snippet of code at a time) was done. Shoehorned into about 3,200 bytes, roughly 2,000 lines of code, it was one tight little BASIC—stripped down, for sure, but robust for its size. No one could have beaten the functionality and speed crammed into that tiny footprint of memory: “The best piece of work we ever did,” as Bill told me recently. And it was a true collaboration. I’d estimate that 45 percent of the code was Bill’s, 30 percent Monte’s, and 25 percent mine, excluding my development tools.

[...]

On July 5, 1991, Buffett was visiting Washington state when he was invited to dinner with Gates’ parents via a mutual friend. The friend teased the possibility that Gates himself might show up, according to Buffett, who told students the story during an event with Gates at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln’s College of Business Administration in 2005.

Meanwhile, Gates protested his invitation.

“It was a funny event because my mom’s very sociable, always getting people together,” Gates tells the students. “I at this time didn’t believe in vacations, was totally focused on my job. So when she said to me, ‘You’ve got to come out and meet Warren...,’ I said, ‘Mom, I’m busy!’”

Gates’ mother pushed back, however, insisting that Buffett would be interesting and worth her son’s time.

“I wasn’t convinced,” Gates writes in a blog post reflecting on the pair’s friendship 25 years later. ”‘Look, he just buys and sells pieces of paper. That’s not real value added. I don’t think we’d have much in common,’ I told her.”

Eventually his mom convinced him to go. “I agreed to stay for no more than two hours before getting back to work at Microsoft,” he writes.

But once Gates and Buffett finally got a chance to talk, things just clicked. Buffett pressed the tech mogul with difficult questions about Microsoft, and Gates welcomed the challenge. “These were amazingly good questions that nobody had ever asked,” he writes.

Gates abandoned his plan to fly back to work that night. “We were suddenly lost in conversation and hours and hours slipped by. He didn’t come across as a big shot investor. He had this modest way of talking about what he does. He was funny, but what impressed me most was how clearly he thought about the world.”

After that night, the pair quickly became close. “It began a really unbelievable friendship for me and I could tell that even though we came from different directions, the kinds of things that fascinated us and that we thought were important were very much the same,” says Gates, speaking to UNL students. [...]

[...]

Early life

Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, on October 28, 1955.^[3] He is the son of William H. Gates Sr.^[c] (b. 1925) and Mary Maxwell Gates (1929–1994).^[19] His ancestry includes English, German, and Irish/Scots-Irish.^[20] His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way of America. Gates's maternal grandfather was J. W. Maxwell, a national bank president. Gates 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.^[21][22] 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.^[23]

Early in his life, Gates observed that his parents wanted him to pursue a law career.^[24] When he was young, his family regularly attended a church of the Congregational Christian Churches, a Protestant Reformed denomination.^[25][26][27] Gates was small for his age and was bullied as a child.^[22] [...]

When he was in the 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.^[32] 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.^[33] 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 for the summer Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Gates's best friend and first business partner Kent Evans, after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.^[34][22]

The four students formed the Lakeside Programmers Club to make money.^[22] At the end of the ban, they offered to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for extra computer time. Rather than use 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.

[...]

[...] Microsoft

[...]

BASIC

Gates read the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics which demonstrated the Altair 8800, and he contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform.[51] In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS's interest. MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demonstration, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration was held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, New Mexico; it was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC. MITS hired Allen,[52] and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with him at MITS in November 1975. Allen named their partnership "Micro-Soft", a combination of "microcomputer" and "software", and their first office was in Albuquerque. The first employee Gates and Allen hired was their high school collaborator Ric Weiland.[52] They dropped the hyphen within a year and officially registered the trade name "Microsoft" with the Secretary of the State of New Mexico on November 26, 1976.[52] Gates never returned to Harvard to complete his studies.

Microsoft's Altair BASIC was popular with computer hobbyists, but Gates discovered that a pre-market copy had leaked out and was being widely copied and distributed. In February 1976, he wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter in which he asserted that more than 90% of the users of Microsoft Altair BASIC had not paid Microsoft for it and the Altair "hobby market" was in danger of eliminating the incentive for any professional developers to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality software.[53] This letter was unpopular with many computer hobbyists, but Gates persisted in his belief that software developers should be able to demand payment. Microsoft became independent of MITS in late 1976, and it continued to develop programming language software for various systems.[52] The company moved from Albuquerque to Bellevue, Washington on January 1, 1979.[51]

Gates said he personally reviewed and often rewrote every line of code that the company produced in its first five years. As the company grew he transitioned into a manager role, then an executive.[54]

IBM partnership

IBM, the leading supplier of computer equipment to commercial enterprises at the time, approached Microsoft in July 1980 concerning software for its upcoming personal computer, the IBM PC.[55] IBM first proposed that Microsoft write the BASIC interpreter. IBM's representatives also mentioned that they needed an operating system, and Gates referred them to Digital Research (DRI), makers of the widely used CP/M operating system.[56] IBM's discussions with Digital Research went poorly, however, and they did not reach a licensing agreement. IBM representative Jack Sams mentioned the licensing difficulties during a subsequent meeting with Gates and asked if Microsoft could provide an operating system. A few weeks later, Gates and Allen proposed using 86-DOS, an operating system similar to CP/M, that Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products (SCP) had made for hardware similar to the PC.[57] Microsoft made a deal with SCP to be the exclusive licensing agent of 86-DOS, and later the full owner. Microsoft employed Paterson to adapt the operating system for the PC[58] and delivered it to IBM as PC DOS for a one-time fee of $50,000.[59]

The contract itself only earned Microsoft a relatively small fee. It was the prestige brought to Microsoft by IBM's adoption of their operating system that would be the origin of Microsoft's transformation from a small business to the leading software company in the world. Gates had not offered to transfer the copyright on the operating system to IBM because he believed that other personal computer makers would clone IBM's PC hardware.[59] They did, making the IBM-compatible PC, running DOS, a de facto standard. The sales of MS-DOS (the version of DOS sold to customers other than IBM) made Microsoft a major player in the industry.[60] The press quickly identified Microsoft as being very influential on the IBM PC. PC Magazine asked if Gates was "the man behind the machine?".[55]

Gates oversaw Microsoft's company restructuring on June 25, 1981, which re-incorporated the company in Washington state and made Gates the president and chairman of the board, with Paul Allen as vice president and vice chairman. In early 1983, Allen left the company after receiving a Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis, effectively ending the formal business partnership between Gates and Allen, which had been strained months prior due to a contentious dispute over Microsoft equity.[51][61] Later in the decade, Gates repaired his relationship with Allen and together the two donated millions to their childhood school Lakeside.[22] They remained friends until Allen's death in October 2018.[62]

[...]

Management style

Gates delivers a speech at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, January 2008

Gates had primary responsibility for Microsoft's product strategy from the company's founding in 1975 until 2006. He gained a reputation for being distant from others; an industry executive complained in 1981 that "Gates is notorious for not being reachable by phone and for not returning phone calls."[64] An Atari executive recalled that he showed Gates a game and defeated him 35 of 37 times. When they met again a month later, Gates "won or tied every game. He had studied the game until he solved it. That is a competitor".[65]

Gates met regularly with Microsoft's senior managers and program managers, and the managers described him as being verbally combative. He also berated them for perceived holes in their business strategies or proposals that placed the company's long-term interests at risk.[66][67] He interrupted presentations with such comments as "that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard"[68] and "why don't you just give up your options and join the Peace Corps?"[69] The target of his outburst would then have to defend the proposal in detail until Gates was fully convinced.[68] When subordinates appeared to be procrastinating, he was known to remark sarcastically, "I'll do it over the weekend."[70][71][72]

During Microsoft's early years, Gates was an active software developer, particularly in the company's programming language products, but his primary role in most of the company's history was as a manager and executive. He has not officially been on a development team since working on the TRS-80 Model 100,[73] but he wrote code that shipped with the company's products as late as 1989.[71] Jerry Pournelle wrote in 1985 when Gates announced Microsoft Excel: "Bill Gates likes the program, not because it's going to make him a lot of money (although I'm sure it will do that), but because it's a neat hack."[74]

On June 15, 2006, Gates announced that he would transition out of his role at Microsoft to dedicate more time to philanthropy. He divided his responsibilities between two successors when he placed Ray Ozzie in charge of management and Craig Mundie in charge of long-term product strategy.[75]

Antitrust litigation

Further information: United States Microsoft antitrust case and European Union Microsoft competition case

Gates giving his deposition at Microsoft on August 27, 1998

Gates approved of many decisions that led to antitrust litigation over Microsoft's business practices. In the 1998 United States v. Microsoft case, Gates gave deposition testimony that several journalists characterized as evasive. He argued with examiner David Boies over the contextual meaning of words such as "compete", "concerned", and "we". Later in the year, when portions of the videotaped deposition were played back in court, the judge was seen laughing and shaking his head.[76] BusinessWeek reported:

Early rounds of his deposition show him offering obfuscatory answers and saying "I don't recall" so many times that even the presiding judge had to chuckle. Worse, many of the technology chief's denials and pleas of ignorance were directly refuted by prosecutors with snippets of e-mail that Gates both sent and received.[77]

Gates later said that he had simply resisted attempts by Boies to mischaracterize his words and actions. "Did I fence with Boies? … I plead guilty… rudeness to Boies in the first degree."[78] Despite Gates's denials, the judge ruled that Microsoft had committed monopolization, tying and blocking competition, each in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.[78]

Post-Microsoft

Since leaving day-to-day operations at Microsoft, Gates has continued his philanthropy and works on other projects.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Gates was the world's highest-earning billionaire in 2013, as his net worth increased by US$15.8 billion to US$78.5 billion. As of January 2014, most of Gates's assets are held in Cascade Investment LLC, an entity through which he owns stakes in numerous businesses, including Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, and Corbis Corp.[79] On February 4, 2014, Gates stepped down as chairman of Microsoft to become "technology advisor" alongside CEO Satya Nadella.[11][80]

Gates provided his perspective on a range of issues in a substantial interview that was published in the March 27, 2014 issue of Rolling Stone magazine. In the interview, Gates provided his perspective on climate change, his charitable activities, various tech companies and people involved in them, and the state of America. In response to a question about his greatest fear when he looks 50 years into the future, Gates stated: "... there'll be some really bad things that'll happen in the next 50 or 100 years, but hopefully none of them on the scale of, say, a million people that you didn't expect to die from a pandemic, or nuclear or bioterrorism." Gates also identified innovation as the "real driver of progress" and pronounced that "America's way better today than it's ever been."[81]

Gates has expressed concern about the potential harms of superintelligence; in a Reddit "ask me anything", he stated that:

First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don't understand why some people are not concerned.[82][83][84][85]

In an interview that was held at the TED conference in March 2015, with Baidu's CEO, Robin Li, Gates said he would "highly recommend" Nick Bostrom's recent work, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.[86] During the conference, Gates warned that the world was not prepared for the next pandemic, a situation that would come to pass in late 2019 when the COVID-19 pandemic began.[87] In March 2018, Gates met at his home in Seattle with Mohammed bin Salman, the reformist crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia to discuss investment opportunities for Saudi Vision 2030.[88][89] In June 2019, Gates admitted that losing the mobile operating system race to Android was his biggest mistake. He stated that it was within their skill set of being the dominant player, but partially blames the antitrust litigation during the time.[90] That same year, Gates became an Advisory Board Member of the Bloomberg New Economy Forum.[91]

On March 13, 2020, Microsoft announced Gates would be leaving his board positions at Berkshire Hathaway and Microsoft to dedicate his efforts in philanthropic endeavors such as climate change, global health and development, and education.[92]

[...]

Recognition

Bill and Melinda Gates being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2016.

• In 1987, Gates was listed as a billionaire in Forbes magazine's 400 Richest People in America issue. He was worth $1.25 billion and was the world's youngest self-made billionaire.[13] Since 1987, Gates has been included in the Forbes The World's Billionaires list and was the wealthiest from 1995 to 1996,[125] 1998 to 2007, 2009, and has been since 2014.[1] Gates was number one on the Forbes 400 list from 1993 through to 2007, 2009, and 2014 through 2017.[126][127]

• Time magazine named Gates one of the 100 people who most influenced the 20th century, as well as one of the 100 most influential people of 2004, 2005, and 2006.

• Time also collectively named Gates, his wife Melinda and U2's lead singer Bono as the 2005 Persons of the Year for their humanitarian efforts.[128] In 2006, he was voted eighth in the list of "Heroes of our time".[129]

• Gates was listed in the Sunday Times power list in 1999, named CEO of the year by Chief Executive Officers magazine in 1994, ranked number one in the "Top 50 Cyber Elite" by Time in 1998, ranked number two in the Upside Elite 100 in 1999, and was included in The Guardian as one of the "Top 100 influential people in media" in 2001.[130]

• Gates was elected Member of the US National Academy of Engineering in 1996 "for contributions to the founding and development of personal computing".[131]

• He was named Honorary Member of the American Library Association in 1998.[132]

• He was elected a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering in 2017.[133]

• According to Forbes, Gates was ranked as the fourth most powerful person in the world in 2012,[134] up from fifth in 2011.[135]

• In 1994, he was honored as the 20th Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society (DFBCS). In 1999, Gates received New York Institute of Technology's President's Medal.[136]

• Gates has received honorary doctorates from Nyenrode Business Universiteit (2003),[137] KTH Royal Institute of Technology (2002),[138] Waseda University (2005),[139] Tsinghua University (2007),[140] Harvard University (2007),[141] the Karolinska Institute (2007),[142] and Cambridge University (2009).[143]

• He was also made an honorary trustee of Peking University in 2007.[144]

• Gates was made an Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005.[145]

• In November 2006, he was awarded the Placard of the Order of the Aztec Eagle, together with his wife Melinda who was awarded the Insignia of the same order, both for their philanthropic work around the world in the areas of health and education, particularly in Mexico, and specifically in the program "Un país de lectores".[146]

• Gates received the 2010 Bower Award for Business Leadership from The Franklin Institute for his achievements at Microsoft and his philanthropic work.[147]

• Also in 2010, he was honored with the Silver Buffalo Award by the Boy Scouts of America, its highest award for adults, for his service to youth.[148]

• In 2002, Bill and Melinda Gates received the Jefferson Award for Greatest Public Service Benefiting the Disadvantaged.[149]

• He was given the 2006 James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award from the Tech Awards.[150]

• In 2015 Gates, along with his wife Melinda, received the Padma Bhushan, India's third-highest civilian award for their social work in the country.[151][152]

• Barack Obama honored Bill and Melinda Gates with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for their philanthropic efforts in 2016,[153] and François Hollande awarded Bill and Melinda in the following year with France's highest national order – as Commander of the Legion of Honour for their charity efforts.[154]

• Entomologists named Bill Gates' flower fly, Eristalis gatesi, in his honor in 1997.[155]

Personal life

Gates and his wife, Melinda, 2009

Gates married Melinda French on a golf course on the Hawaiian island of Lanai on January 1, 1994. They have three children. The family resides in Xanadu 2.0, an earth-sheltered mansion in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington. In 2009, property taxes on the mansion were reported to be US$1.063 million, on a total assessed value of US$147.5 million.[156] The 66,000-square-foot (6,100 m²) estate has a 60-foot (18 m) swimming pool with an underwater music system, as well as a 2,500-square-foot (230 m²) gym and a 1,000-square-foot (93 m²) dining room.[157]

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Gates stated in regard to his faith: "The moral systems of religion, I think, are super important. We've raised our kids in a religious way; they've gone to the Catholic church that Melinda goes to and I participate in. I've been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that's kind of a religious belief. I mean, it's at least a moral belief."[158]

Gates also said: "I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill. But the mystery and the beauty of the world is overwhelmingly amazing, and there's no scientific explanation of how it came about. To say that it was generated by random numbers, that does seem, you know, sort of an uncharitable view [laughs]. I think it makes sense to believe in God, but exactly what decision in your life you make differently because of it, I don't know."[158]

Gates purchased the Codex Leicester, a collection of scientific writings by Leonardo da Vinci, for US$30.8 million at an auction in 1994.[159] Gates is an avid reader, and the ceiling of his large home library is engraved with a quotation from The Great Gatsby.[160] He also enjoys playing bridge, tennis, and golf.[161][162] Gates's days are planned for him on a minute-by-minute basis, similar to the U.S. President's schedule.[163] Despite his wealth and extensive business travel, Gates flew coach in commercial aircraft until 1997, when he bought a private jet.

In 1999, his wealth briefly surpassed US$101 billion.[164][165] Since 2000, the nominal value of his Microsoft holdings has declined due to a fall in Microsoft's stock price after the dot-com bubble burst and the multi-billion dollar donations he has made to his charitable foundations. In May 2006, Gates remarked that he wished that he were not the richest man in the world because he disliked the attention it brought.[166] In March 2010, Gates was the second wealthiest person behind Carlos Slim, but regained the top position in 2013, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires List.[167][168] Slim retook the position again in June 2014[169][170] (but then lost the top position back to Gates). Between 2009 and 2014, his wealth doubled from US$40 billion to more than US$82 billion.[171] In October 2017, Gates was surpassed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as the richest person in the world.[14] On November 15, 2019, he once again became the richest person in the world after a 48% increase in Microsoft shares, surpassing Bezos.[172] Gates told the BBC, "I've paid more tax than any individual ever, and gladly so ... I've paid over $6 billion in taxes."[173] He is a proponent of higher taxes, particularly for the rich.[174]

Gates has held the top spot on the list of The World's Billionaires for 18 out of the past 23 years.[175] Gates has several investments outside Microsoft, which in 2006 paid him a salary of US$616,667 and US$350,000 bonus totalling US$966,667.[176] In 1989, he founded Corbis, a digital imaging company. In 2004, he became a director of Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company headed by long-time friend Warren Buffett.[177]

In 2016, he revealed that he is color-blind.[178]

External business ventures and investments (partial list)

Gates has a multi-billion dollar investment portfolio with stake in various sectors[179] and has participated in several entrepreneurial ventures beyond Microsoft, including:

• AutoNation, automotive retailer that Gates has a 16% stake in trading on the NYSE.

• bgC3, a new think-tank company founded by Gates.

• Canadian National Railway (CN), a Canadian Class I freight railway. As of 2019, Bill Gates is the largest single shareholder of CN stock.[180]

• Cascade Investment LLC, a private investment and holding company incorporated in the United States, founded and controlled by Bill Gates and headquartered in Kirkland, Washington.

• Corbis (originally named Interactive Home Systems and now known as Branded Entertainment Network), a digital image licensing and rights services company founded by Gates.

• EarthNow, Seattle-based startup company aiming to blanket the Earth with live satellite video coverage. Gates is a large financial backer.

• Eclipse Aviation, a defunct manufacturer of very light jets. Gates was a major stake-holder early on in the project.

• Ecolab, global provider of water, hygiene and energy technologies and services to the food, energy, healthcare, industrial and hospitality markets. Gates increased his stake of 10.8% in Ecolab to 25% in 2012.

• ResearchGate, a social networking site for scientists. Gates participated in a $35 million round of financing along with other investors.[181]

• TerraPower, a nuclear reactor design company founded by Gates.

[...]

[...]

Establishment and Development of Microsoft

In June, 1975, Bill Gates creates a company for software development and names it Microsoft (the first version was Micro-Soft). Despite of the hard work of its employees, the company at first experienced some difficulties with distribution of any software products. The company did not have enough money to hire a good sales manager, so this function was performed by Bill Gates’ mother Mary Maxwell Gates.

Early next year, Gates and Allen found out that the income of the company has dropped to the lowest affordable point. Its main reason was so called ‘piracy’ – illegal copying of software and the use of it without permission of the creator. Many people simply copied the MS-Basic and handed it to someone else. Realizing this, Bill Gates was furious, especially because ‘piracy’ was depriving him from the well-earned income. In addition, these copies contained some mistakes which he wanted to reduce before the formal release of MS-Basic. Gates wrote an open letter in February 1976, which was published in a newsletter for Altair users. In response, the Gates Foundation has received 300 letters, but only a few of them contained a check.

Bill Gates was the very first to state the need in a protection of the software. His actions have made an incredible contribution to the gradual introduction of a thought that a computer program is a product of creativity and therefore must be protected in the same way as a musical composition or a literary work.

[....]

In 1976, it became obvious that Bill Gates could not continue his studies and manage a growing company at the same time. In December, he left the university, despite of all the objections of his parents, and fully engaged with the business. At that time, he was only twenty one.

Then, the young businessmen got a lucky strike and the profit of Microsoft sales reached $500,000 dollars for the 1977 financial year. The company, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, had a staff of 13 people. Paul Allen and Gates were engaged in organizational issues: Paul was responsible for the development of new software, and Bill communicated with the computer manufactures, and ran daily operations of the company

In 1979, Bill received an offer from IBM to create an operating system for the world’s first personal computer. However, Bill Gates was forced to deny the proposal of IBM, as he did not have any drafts for creating OS at the moment. Therefore, the CEO of Microsoft was forced to recommend IBM to seek help from its competitor Digital Research, which later will be the developer of the OS for IBM personal computer.

Meanwhile, Microsoft buys a ‘crude’ operating system 86-DOS for $50,000 dollars from the Seattle Computer and hires Tim Paterson, the creator of 86-DOS. Bill Gates’s company greatly refined 86-DOS, and soon the world saw MS-DOS, which Microsoft offered to use as the main OS for IBM personal computer, thus beating Digital Research. In September 1980, IBM signed a detailed contract with Microsoft. This contract was destined to change the history of the personal computer industry. Both IBM and Microsoft benefited from it. Gates’ main competitor Digital Research changed the course of business and they were no longer involved in the competition.

In 1981, Microsoft becomes a corporation, the management of which is shared between Bill Gates and Paul Allen. In the same year, IBM introduces its personal computer with 16-bit operating system MS-DOS. In addition, the IBM PC includes other Microsoft products such as BASIC, COBOL, Pascal and others.

From Bill Gates biography we learned that in 1982, Gates convinced IBM management that MS-DOS should be sold under the license and other computer manufacturers, thereby making the competition of Apple, which was selling its computers based on its own operating system.

In 1983, The Microsoft Hardware group (formed in 1982) creates a manipulator called ‘Mouse’ for an easy data input into a computer with a graphical user interface. In the same year, the corporation presents a text editor for MS-DOS. In addition to all of these, the company of Bill Gates announced Windows – the extension of the operating system for MS-DOS as a universal operating environment for graphics applications.

[...]

Recognition and Philanthropy

[...]

In 2005, Queen Elizabeth II appointed Bill Gates ( see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3428673.stm ) an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) and he could use the post-nominal letters KBE after his name. In November 2006, the Mexican government awarded Bill Gates and his wife Melinda Gates with the Order of the Aztec Eagle for their philanthropic contributions in the world’s development, especially in the health and education spheres.

[...]

When did you first have the vision of a computer on every desk at work and in every home?

Bill Gates: Paul Allen and I had used that phrase even before we wrote the BASIC for Microsoft. We actually talked about it in an article in -- I think 1977 was the first time it appears in print -- where we say, "a computer on every desk and in every home..." and actually we said, "...running Microsoft software." If we were just talking about the vision, we'd leave those last three words out. If we were talking an internal company discussion, we'd put those words in. It's very hard to recall how crazy and wild that was, you know, "on every desk and in every home." At the time, you have people who are very smart saying, "Why would somebody need a computer?" Even Ken Olsen, who had run this company Digital Equipment, who made the computer I grew up with, and that we admired both him and his company immensely, was saying that this seemed kind of a silly idea that people would want to have a computer.

When Microsoft was starting out, you guys made a deal with Apple Computer for a flat fee of $21,000 or something. What did you learn from that experience?

Bill Gates: Microsoft did the software for all the personal computers that came out. There was the Apple II that we did a BASIC for, which was called Apple Soft BASIC. There was a Commodore PET that we did a BASIC for. There was a Radio Shack TRS 80 that we did a BASIC for. Even Atari, who initially had their own mini-BASIC, ended up using our BASIC. So our BASIC was running on every single machine, including that Apple machine. We later did a BASIC for the Macintosh. We didn't mind doing low priced contracts at the time, because we always knew that there would be new versions and more software that we would do. So it worked out well. As part of that Apple deal, I got to know Steve Wozniak, who is actually the engineer and did software programming, and Steve Jobs, who later I would do a lot of work with, because he was deeply involved in the Macintosh work.

Apple sold a lot of those computers -- the Apple II. Wouldn't you have made a lot more money at that time if you had royalties?

Bill Gates: Well, we had plenty of ways to do new versions and add-ons and things. So no, the whole structure of the way we licensed things was that we knew we could write software more efficiently than if they hired the engineers themselves. So we always were able to say, "Hey, you would have spent a half a million developing that yourself. We'll license it to you for an inexpensive price." We probably could have had higher prices, but we were doing fine. In fact, that 6502 BASIC that Mark Chamberlain and I wrote, we licensed to about 12 different people. So our profitability was huge, even though it was a great deal for Apple. Per machine they paid almost nothing.

You came out very early against illegal copying of software. You wrote a piece for Computer Notes, warning that piracy could create serious obstacles for your industry.

Bill Gates: Yeah. The MITS Altair people agreed to pay us a royalty for each copy that was sold. So if people paid MITS we got a royalty, and if they just copied the program -- which was at the time on paper tape -- we didn't get paid. There was a lot of this going on, and the amount of piracy was going to determine whether Microsoft could hire more people or not. So I wrote -- it wasn't mean -- what was called "An Open Letter to Hobbyists," that said, "By the way, this is copyrighted material, and the more we sell, the more software we'll be able to write." And that started a debate that rages to this day, it will rage for decades to come. Should creative people who do music or books or software be able to get a royalty for their stuff, or should people pirate it? There's a lot of complicated issues in intellectual property, but it started early in the computer industry. A lot of people did actually respond to the letter by coming back and paying the license fee, which was very low. I mean, everything was very, very cheap.

When IBM first came to you for an operating system, you sent them to another company, Digital Research, first. Why did you do that?

Bill Gates:I had been talking about our BASIC, and running that on a computer. There's two ways you could run BASIC. You can run it where the BASIC is right on the hardware and the only thing you're running is BASIC, or you can put another layer of software in between, called an operating system, and it can take over some of the work, like managing the printers and things, and you can have many programs, BASIC or a spreadsheet or a word processor, running on top of that. And as we got disks on these computers, it made more sense to have that flexibility. The early computers don't have disks; they have cassette tapes and paper tapes and things like that. But by 1979, '80, we're starting to get these big, expensive -- actually, initially eight-inch -- floppy disks, then five-and-a-quarter inch, finally three-and-a-half inch. Now, when's the last time you saw a floppy disk? But they were very important. We still have a hard disk, the disk built into the computer. So you needed an operating system.

When IBM saw that we had written the software for all the personal computers, they came to us, sought our advice on the design, but we said, "You should put a disk in," and since they wanted to ship very quickly, another company called Digital Research had done that work for the 8-bit machines, and they were starting to do a version for these new 16-bit machines. We convinced IBM to do a 16-bit machine using this 8086, 8088 processor. Well, Digital Research really hadn't finished the work, and then IBM was getting frustrated because Digital Research wouldn't sign even the non-disclosure agreement, and then some of us, particularly Paul and a key person named Kazi Konishi, who was from Japan and worked with us, said, "No, no, no, we should just do that ourselves." And because of the quick timing, we ended up licensing the original code from another company and turned that into MS-DOS. So then subsequently, MS-DOS competed with this Digital Research CPM. After about two or three years, MS-DOS became far, far more popular than CPM, and then eventually we would take and add graphics capability on top of MS-DOS, and then integrate the two together. And so today when we talk about Windows, it actually includes all those MS-DOS things in it, that's the full operating system. Although mostly you think of the graphics and the windows and stuff, there's a lot of more classic operating system capability that's built in there.

Did you get a royalty from IBM for each computer they sold with MS-DOS?

Bill Gates: Actually, no. The IBM initial deal is a flat fee deal, another flat fee deal. It had certain restrictions that prevented IBM from selling to other hardware makers. So if people did IBM PC compatible machines, we would get the revenue by doing business directly with those people. And the deal was very complicated, but it was a deal that Steve Ballmer -- who's a key person with the company by that time -- and I thought a lot about. It was a fairly junior team from IBM, so we tried to make sure that -- given our belief that personal computers would be hyper-popular -- that Microsoft would get a lot of that upside. So they felt they got a very good deal, which they did, but as the industry expanded, we -- for new versions and for different machines -- we got that opportunity, even though they did not pay us a royalty.

When did you realize just how wildly successful this business would be?

Bill Gates: Even in the early days, if you set a computer on every desk in every home, and you'd say, "Okay, how many homes are there in the world? How many desks are there in the world? Can I make $20 for every home, $20 for every desk?" you could get these big numbers. But part of the beauty of the whole thing was we were very focused on the here and now. Should we hire one more person? If our customers didn't pay us, would we have enough cash to meet the payroll? We really were very practical about that next thing, and so involved in the deep engineering that we didn't get ahead of ourselves. We never thought how big we'd be. I remember when one of the early lists of wealthy people came out and one of the Intel founders was there, the guy that ran Wang computers actually was still -- Wang was still doing well -- and we thought, "Hmm. Boy, if the software business does well, the value of Microsoft could be similar to that." But it wasn't a real focus. The everyday activity of just doing great software drew us in. And some decisions we made -- like the quality of the people, the way we were very global, the vision of how we thought about software -- that was very long term. But other than those things, we just came into work every day and wrote more code and hired more people. It wasn't really until the IBM PC succeeded, and perhaps even until Windows succeeded, that there was a broad awareness that Microsoft was very unique as a software company, and that these other companies had been one-product companies, hadn't hired people, couldn't do a broad set of things, didn't renew their excellence, didn't do research. So we thought we were doing something very unique, but it was easily not until 1995, or even 1997, that there was this wide recognition that we were the company that had revolutionized software.

[...]

Your parents took you out of public school to send you to the Lakeside School. Apparently that school had a big impact on you. Why did they make that move?

Bill Gates: My parents had this notion that I had this high potential somehow and that I was not taking advantage of it. The environment that I had been in, sort of being a goof-off was more socially rewarding than being that serious. It was public school, so they weren't pushing people all that hard. You could read the textbook in the first week and there wasn't anything interesting going to happen the rest of the school year. So they had me take an exam to go to a private school. And I thought, "Well, should I pass this exam or not? You could fail it and you wouldn't have to go." But that sort of violated my sense of integrity. "Hey, I'm good at taking tests. I don't want to get confused about that." So I was admitted and they encouraged me to go. It was a boys' school, reasonably strict. During the time I was there it actually transitioned, merged with a girls' school and stopped having uniforms, stopped calling the teachers "Master." So it became pretty normal, but it was a change at first. And the idea of just being kind of a goof-off wasn't the sort of high reward position like it had been in public schools. So my parents were right, it had the intended effect of creating a more challenging environment. And some teachers who were nice about saying that I should try harder, and exposing me to a lot of math and science, and eventually that's where I got to use the computer.

We've read that at first you weren't thrilled about the transfer to Lakeside.

Bill Gates: Lakeside was a longer school day, and it's a change. I had gotten super comfortable at public school, kind of being goofy, and here people were studying, and at first, because I didn't get great grades, they had me in a study hall, and a few people who got really good grades didn't have to go to the study hall. Nobody knew that I was actually clever, so they were actually treating me like some average student. Anyway, it was an adjustment. All the other kids there were making the adjustment as well. So it took a couple of years to get my grounding. I'm super glad that I went to that school. It is a fantastic school. I'll probably send my kids to that school.

[...]

After you got kicked off the C Cubed system, was that tough, spending the summer without a computer?

Bill Gates: Yeah, well no. I had many things that were interesting. I was really quite serious about math at the time and various science things. Paul had actually read more science fiction that I had, by a lot, so he and I would talk about that. But I had plenty of things, it wasn't some great tragedy. But then we got pulled back in, and then that company went bankrupt, and then we had the work for this Portland company on the payroll program, and then we had the scheduling program.

We were lucky. There were always kinds of things that not only gave us an opportunity, but exposed us to that next level. After the payroll program, then there was a computer project to use computers to control all the electricity grid in the dams of the Pacific Northwest. A government agency called Bonneville Power had done a contract with a company called TRW to use computers to do all this control. And TRW had committed to do all this really high-reliability great software work. Well, they found it more difficult than they expected, so they were looking for people who understood these kinds of computers, which Paul Allen and I had done a lot of work on. These were the same computers that were at Computer Center Corporation and at this Portland company, Information Sciences. Anyway, we were kind of famous -- but nobody had met us -- because we had filed these problem reports. And by the end of these problem reports -- they were so sophisticated -- it was like, "Who are these guys out in Seattle telling us how to fix all this stuff?" So when TRW was saying, "Hey, we're desperate. Find us..." they're telling Digital Equipment, who makes these things, "Find us the best programmers," and somebody says, "Well, there's Gates and Allen..." and somebody says, "Nobody's really met them, but yeah, they're really good, we ought to be able to track them down." So they find us, this one guy, and we go for an interview. And these two kids show up and -- what was I when I was interviewed? I was 16 when they interviewed me. So they were like, "We can't hire you." But then they talked to us about software and we clearly know a lot. And when you're young and you know a lot, people don't have any kind of intermediate thing. You're either what you're supposed to be, which is a kid that doesn't know that much, or they think, "Whoa, this guy is the limit!" We were pretty good programmers. But anyway, so we got jobs at this TRW and that exposed me to some programmers, who were way better than I was, who critiqued my work. I could look at their work. And this one guy was really a phenomenal programmer.

[So were they good or not? If they ripped it up and provided criticism, how much value did they really add???]

Was that John Norton?

Bill Gates: Yeah. He would just take my stuff and rip it apart, you know, in this super constructive way. Anyway, it was a brilliant thing. So part of my senior year, and the summer before and after the senior year, Paul and I were down in Vancouver, Washington. So it kind of took our understanding to a whole new level, and it exposed us to a bunch of people there. And Paul, the whole time -- ever since he'd seen that microprocessor article -- was saying, "You know, there's an opportunity here. This is going to be big. We ought to think what we're going to do about this." So we kept talking about that.

[...]

But you didn't even have the machine, did you?

Bill Gates: Yeah, that's a complication. When you turn a computer on, there's nothing in it. It doesn't even know how to go out to the teletype and read this paper tape that has all these funny numbers on it that are this program. So you have to put in -- using the switches -- a little program, that's the program called the bootstrap loader that is the instructions to say, "Hey, go read a bunch of numbers off of this paper tape, put those into the memory and then go run that program." So he wrote a bootstrap loader, literally on the plane flying there, he wrote a nice bootstrap loader. It worked just fine. Later I wrote a really, really small one, because it's a pain to have to -- every time the computer is turned back on you have to reenter the thing, so the less of these funny little instructions, the better. Anyway, so he wrote that, and everybody was amazed because we had to do everything totally right, how we read this instruction set manual and they were selling these kit computers, but they had never really seen it do anything real. And so Paul would type in 'Print 2 plus 2.' Print..." and he ran programs and it worked.

And this was a machine that you had never actually seen.

Bill Gates: That's right. The chip itself was fairly expensive. Paul and I had bought a previous chip to do a very specialized machine. We had bought an 8008 to do a little funny program that did traffic volume printouts, but this 8080 was much better. And we had never had one of those, so we just read the book that described how it worked. And then we made the big computer that we'd been using all those years -- and we're quite expert in -- Paul had a really breakthrough idea of how to do the simulation thing. So that gave us the full power of that computer to edit and debug and those things. But if we had any mistake in how we read this thing, that paper tape wasn't going to work at all. Anyway, so that was very exciting, and we signed a deal with them. That was called MITS, and their computer was called the Altair. And then I left Harvard University and we started Microsoft. So Microsoft was initially based down in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And this is 1973 when we get going.

How did the name Microsoft come about? Do you remember?

Bill Gates: You know, we had been talking about that actually back at Harvard, microcomputer software, and nobody else had done a company doing software for these things, and we thought it was a cool term, "Microsoft." When we had been kids and sending our names in for mailing lists we'd played around with a lot of company names, including "Allen & Gates" or things like that, but we decided no, it would be better not to have our names in it, because it wasn't like a law firm that was always kind of a small thing. We thought, "Hey, we're going to have a big company, so we'll have a company name." So "Microsoft" was a very natural choice.

When Ed Roberts of MITS agreed to buy your program, you included a "best efforts" clause requiring him to try to sublicense and promote your software. How did that turn out?

Bill Gates: Microsoft was only a few people and we'd written this BASIC, and the idea was to license it to lots of companies and then to write other software. So the head of MITS said he could help us market it to other people and take a sales commission for that, and I wrote the contract so that if they weren't serious about promoting it and putting a lot of investment into that, they would lose that right. That was the "best efforts" clause, a very strong requirement. They never got serious about that, and yet they kind of liked the idea of them having the BASIC and other people not. So we were discussing that, how we were going to resolve this problem, because we needed to license it to other people, and we were doing all the work to license it to other people even though they were getting this commission. And right at that time, another company, Pertec, bought MITS, and then those people got confused about the contract and so they weren't even paying us the money they owed us. They were essentially trying to starve us, so we terminated the contract. It had an arbitration clause. The arbitrator found that we were right. Five out of five reasons to terminate the contract, we were only right about five of them! So that contract was terminated. And then we had to -- like, we ended up having to do -- built our sales and marketing activities. And by then we started to have some other programs as well. So we started to hire more people and things really got going. The big thing though, was that because Pertec moved that company out to California, we no longer had a reason to be in Albuquerque, because you couldn't recruit people there as easily as you could to other locations. So we talked about where to move, and eventually, in 1979, we move up to Seattle.

When you decided to leave Harvard to just concentrate on business, what was your parents' reaction?

Bill Gates: [...] when it came time to go on leave from Harvard, the policies of the school about -- if you're gone -- letting you come back are incredibly generous. So if the enterprise had failed, then I would have been back. So my parents were a little surprised, and kind of wondering what it meant, but they were pretty supportive. And in fact, when we got into this legal dispute with Pertec, my dad gave me good advice. He was very supportive on that, and so we saw that through. And then, as the company became successful, I hope they felt better about it. The only really bad case was if I stayed and the company was kind of mediocre-ally successful. If it failed it would be okay, if it was a big success it would be okay, and they could see I was very energized. And I thought we needed to get in at the very beginning and not waste a year or two, which is what I had left of my undergraduate course requirements.

[...]

Do you ever wonder what would have happened if the BASIC program for MITS had not worked?

Bill Gates: Oh, I don't think it would have been a dramatic setback. We would have figured out what mistake we'd made and eventually gotten the thing running. It turns out, even though we were in this big rush, there weren't many other people doing serious work at the time. It was another couple of years before other software companies showed up. And even then, they weren't that serious about hiring people. They didn't have people who really understood about writing software, and how you created a company around writing software. They didn't figure out the global nature of the market. So we would have been fine. But it was certainly exciting that there was no mistake at all.

[...]

A child prodigy, William Henry Gates III (nicknamed "Trey," card-playing slang for a three) spent much time cocooned in his room. When his mother, Mary, asked over the intercom what he was doing, he would shout, "I'm thinking. . . . Have you ever tried thinking?" Small for his age, Gates was subject to bullying. "The Gateses didn't know what to do with Trey," says the Rev. Marvin Evans, the father of Gates's best friend in adolescence.

[...]

In building Microsoft, however, Gates and Ballmer became a network unto themselves. They are stylistic opposites, both open to caricature: Gates has the nasal voice and pasty complexion of the petulant nerd. Ballmer, 6 feet 1, 225 pounds, bald and loud -- his vocal cords once required surgical repair from excessive shouting -- is the corporate evangelist.

It was clear that Bill Gates had had enough.

The company he had founded and built into a colossus was taking a beating from federal antitrust lawyers. His competitors were emboldened, and the marketplace was chaotic. Chief among his frustrations was that he was spending little time on the technology work he loved most.

At one meeting, Gates's voice broke and his eyes teared up. Over the next several months, colleagues noticed that he was becoming increasingly overwrought, distracted, quicker tempered. He seemed to be losing weight and sleep.

So early this year, the world's richest man gave himself a present. He restored himself to full-time nerd status, stepping down as chief executive of Microsoft and assuming the title of chief software architect. He would remain as chairman of the company, but the rest he would leave to his best friend, the new CEO, Steve Ballmer.

On Jan. 13, the day the switch was to be announced, Gates called a few friends to tell them.

"Well, Steve certainly got the short end of that stick," longtime Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold told Gates.

"I know, he really did," Gates said, laughing. "Thank God he's willing to do this for me."

Steve Ballmer would do nearly anything for Bill Gates. Likewise Gates for Ballmer. Although the two men were assuming new roles, it was clear to anyone close to Microsoft that the company's intellectual and emotional core would still reside where it always has: in the complex and symbiotic relationship between Gates and Ballmer, the new economy's most powerful partnership.

To understand the bond between them is to understand why Microsoft has become the exemplar of new-economy dominance -- and America's most famously embattled company.

By now, Gates has achieved the stature of an icon, both for computing generally and Microsoft specifically. But throughout his life he has always picked out an alter ego, someone who could nourish less-developed sides of himself while matching his brainpower and zeal. He and Ballmer have been friends since they were Harvard dormmates 26 years ago. Since Ballmer joined Microsoft in 1980, the two men have come to function almost as a single executive.

Like many high-tech pioneers, the two enjoyed comfortable suburban childhoods that whetted, rather than dulled, their drive to succeed. They embody the old-money and new-money prototypes of 20th-century affluence: Gates is the great-grandson of the man who founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1911; Ballmer's father, a Swiss immigrant who settled his family in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills, was a Ford Motor Co. accountant who began trumpeting his expectation that his son would attend Harvard when the boy was 8.

Both endured early social problems that friends say marked them for life. Ballmer was so shy, he would hyperventilate before going to Hebrew school. "I was just so scared," he says. "So I wouldn't throw up, my mom would have to make me take short breaths." Today, his motivational speeches at Microsoft events are legend -- but before he gets to the part where he runs through high-fiving, cheering crowds till he doubles over, sweating and panting, he has to psych himself into the idea that he's up to the performance.

[...]

Gates, friends say, has an instinctive ability to "outsource" a large part of his intellect and psyche to others. Ballmer can perform this role mainly on the force of his personality, his willingness and ability to fight back. "Steve has found a way to work with Bill without subjugating himself," Raburn says. "The moment you subjugate yourself to Bill, it can get a little dangerous. . . . He can be an alpha male in collaborative situations."

While he and Ballmer are similar in fundamental ways, Gates can appreciate that Ballmer has a radically different style, personality and outlook, all of which can be useful to Microsoft, and him. The distinctions abound.

Gates is a nearly mystical figure at Microsoft. Ballmer is frontally engaged.

Gates communicates largely by e-mail, a point underscored by his elaborate responses to follow-up questions in the days after the interview. Ballmer, a fat-fingered and erratic e-mailer ("graet tnx"), invades personal space, pops his head into offices and often startles. Gates loves bridge, Ballmer loves basketball. Gates nibbles at French fries, Ballmer eats muffins by ripping the tops off. At a toast during Gates's bachelor party weekend in Las Vegas in late 1993, Ballmer, his best man, teased his friend as "someone who sees life as complex," rife with shades of gray. "NOT ME," he boomed. "WITH ME, IT'S BLACK OR WHITE, ON OR OFF."

Gates hates being touched. "Bill gives off a physical reaction that says, 'Step back a little bit,' " says Christine Comaford, a Gates friend who worked at Microsoft in the 1980s. One former Microsoft executive recalls walking through the Tokyo airport with Gates in 1996. Gates instructed the executive to appear as if they were locked in an intense conversation, so celebrity-seekers would be less likely to approach.

"Steve is a guy you want to be loyal to," Comaford says. "Bill is more of a guy to be in awe of."

Ballmer has been called the company's id. In the late 1980s, acting on a challenge from another executive, he stripped to his white boxers and swam across Lake Bill, a man-made lake at the center of Microsoft's campus.

When called upon, he'll also play bad cop. "Bill can be a complete wimp," Myhrvold says. He's a lousy negotiator, Myhrvold says. "There was one very big acquisition deal where Bill says to me, 'Now, don't let me get alone with this guy, because I'll just agree.' " Myhrvold adds that Ballmer doesn't relish playing the tough guy, and if he offends someone, he often acts "like a Saint Bernard puppy who knocks you over and then starts licking your face."

He is also prone to mood swings -- "We're golden, we're golden," Ballmer will say in an up moment, and "We're screwed, we're screwed," during the inevitable swoon. Gates wallows in problems, "tastes every drop of misery," a Microsoft executive says.

In September 1996, Gates made a presentation at San Francisco's Moscone Center to announce the launch of its latest version of Explorer. Afterward, he took some engineers and executives to the hotel bar next door to celebrate.

But Gates, drinking white Russians, fixated on a Microsoft e-mail product and started working him self up about "what a piece of [expletive]" it was. His tablemates had nothing to do with the product, and prodded Gates. "Yeah," Gates said, "that's the worst piece of software we've ever shipped," and he ranted for about 20 minutes.

At a 1998 meeting with seven managers who worked on Microsoft Office, Ballmer was not pleased with the answers. "Does anyone here understand Office?" he yelled, according to someone at the meeting. He jumped up from a conference table in Building 18, his shirt coming untucked in the back. "Anyone?" He told a nearby secretary to "get someone on the phone who understands Office."

Ballmer and Gates's relationship is commonly called a "marriage," even by the principals. "We trusted each other from the very beginning in a very deep way," Gates says. It is a hallmark of their relationship that they treat each other as roughly as they treat others. Microsoft executive Deborah Willingham recalls a meeting shortly after the release of Windows 95. Excess software was accumulating in stores. Ballmer took responsibility, but Gates wouldn't let the issue die.

"Why do we do this?" he said.

"Look, I said I made that mistake," Ballmer thundered to the man his children call Uncle Bill. "How many times do you want to hear me say I made that mistake?"

"Well," Gates said, smiling, "I might want to hear it a few more times."

The intimacy of Gates's partnerships was established early on. Kent Hood Evans was his boyhood best friend and first business collaborator. Kent was dreamy, dogged and largely devoid of inhibition. He carried Barron's and Fortune around Lakeside in his enormous briefcase. In a re{acute}sume{acute} for a summer job, he wrote: "I am looking for a job that involves programming that I consider interesting." He pushed Gates to think big and take risks.

Evans loved politics and government and even asked Gates if he wanted to join him in a foreign service career. Maybe it could result in an ambassadorship. "This is, like, ninth grade," Gates says.

They would speak for hours on the phone at night, sharing ideas about business and computers. They had a deep understanding of their subject and communicated in a kind of shorthand. At Microsoft, Gates calls this "high-bandwidth communication."

In the late 1960s, Lakeside was one of the first schools in the country to have a computer. It was a Teletype machine about the size of a microwave oven, and it became a magnet for math whizzes Gates and Evans and upperclassmen Paul Allen and Ric Weiland, who would become one of Microsoft's first employees. They formed the Lakeside Programmers Club, but it was no hobbyists' group. The goal was to make money.

The club operated with minimal supervision. This was by design, says Fred Wright, the Lakeside math chairman, who provided that supervision. "Our philosophy was, get a group of smart people together, give them tools and get out of the way," Wright says. That, he says, is the best environment to spur creativity, competition and collaboration. "If you want to see the roots of Microsoft's culture, look no further than the Lakeside Programmers Club," Kent's father says.

The four boys spent late-night hours at Seattle's Computer Center Corp. ("C-cubed"), which offered time on a Digital Equipment Corp. machine per an agreement with Lakeside. When C-cubed went out of business in 1970, the Lakeside Programmers Club nearly imploded in civil war. Gates and Evans arranged to buy a set of DEC tapes cheap in a bankruptcy auction -- without the knowledge of their partners. They hid the tapes in a room at Lakeside, and when Allen learned of this, he found and kept them. Livid, Gates and Evans threatened legal action. They were 15.

Bill and Kent were inseparable and overextended. School and computers ate up most of their time, the latter more so as they took on consulting jobs -- often in exchange for computing time. In their junior year, 1971-1972, a Lakeside teacher enlisted them to automate the school's class-scheduling system. They pulled a string of all-nighters, hoping to have the program ready for their senior year. Evans took a break to go mountain climbing over the Memorial Day weekend. He slipped and fell to his death on May 28, 1972, in an accident his father attributes to the fatigue that came with his schedule.

"I was devastated," Gates writes in an e-mail. Gates was scheduled to speak at Kent's funeral, but he was too distraught. When Marvin Evans met Melinda Gates a few years ago, she said her husband still talked about Kent all the time.

"It's been nearly thirty years," Gates writes, "and I still remember his phone number."

Even in his grief, Gates was determined to finish the Lakeside scheduling project. In choosing a new collaborator, he turned to Paul Allen.

[...]

The world's first personal computer.

[...]

From the time he dropped out of Harvard, Gates kept track of Ballmer. They spoke by phone, and Ballmer even visited Albuquerque. Ballmer first went to work at Procter & Gamble, where he learned how to market Coldsnap Freezer Dessert Makers and, later, Duncan Hines cake mixes.

"Steve was extremely intense, very personable and probably the smartest man I've ever met," says Gordon Tucker, who worked with Ballmer at P&G. Ballmer's knowledge was vast and versatile, but none of Ballmer's colleagues remembers him expressing interest in computers.

Nor do any of them describe him as shy, but Ballmer says he battled his shyness perpetually. When he grew tired of selling cakes, he wanted to try his hand at screenwriting. But he was petrified to tell his P&G boss that he was leaving. To work up his nerve, he rolled down the windows of his blue Mustang and turned Rod Stewart's "Do You Think I'm Sexy?" up to the radio's full volume.

At Stanford Business School -- his next stop after a brief stay in Hollywood -- Ballmer would perform similar rituals en route to class. "He would keep telling himself, 'I'm gonna kick some ass in class today,' " says classmate Dan Rudolph, who rode with him. The sound track for this mantra was often Michael Jackson's "Rock With You."

Unlike Harvard and other East Coast business schools, Stanford placed a heavy emphasis on cooperation and teamwork. Ballmer was well liked at Stanford, but his manic style of engagement and competition played badly with some. So did his habit of advertising all the prestigious consulting firms that were offering him jobs.

So it surprised some of his Stanford friends to learn that Ballmer, after only a year, was considering a job with an unknown software company in Seattle, where Microsoft had moved in 1979 (the hyphen died in 1976). But friends recall Ballmer expressing conflicting desires -- between traditional paths to success and something riskier.

Ballmer liked Gates's ambitions, plus "he has always put a great deal of value on personal relationships," says Michael Levinthal, a Stanford classmate. "Here was this guy, Bill Gates, who he clearly trusted. And when Steve trusts someone . . . he'll invest a great deal."

Even at 24, Ballmer had fashioned a business identity for himself. He had grown comfortable in important but supportive roles: As a business manager of the Harvard Crimson, he supported the efforts of the writers and editors. As manager of the football team, he worked behind the scenes while others played the game. He was comfortable with dirty work. "There are two ways to succeed in business," he has told at least two people. "One is to have the big insights. The other is to take the big insights and make it happen."

At that point, in 1980, Microsoft needed someone who would confront the challenges of running a growing business: hiring, personnel, finances. Essentially, Gates sought someone with whom he could join in a business mind-meld -- to complement the mind-meld on technology issues he already had with Allen.

Gates sealed Ballmer's commitment to Microsoft in a ship-to-shore phone call from a sailboat in the British Virgin Islands. He offered him a salary of $50,000 and, more important, a significant equity stake in the company -- 5 percent to 10 percent. This raised some hackles among the tight-knit group of early Microsoft employees, many of whom held a natural bias against non-techies like Ballmer. He was employee No. 24.

The Gates-Ballmer marriage erupted in quarreling before the honeymoon ended. In one of Ballmer's first acts at Microsoft, he insisted that the company needed to hire 17 people. But for all his aggressive goals, Gates could be very tight with the corporate dollar. He maintained that Microsoft never take on debt and always have enough money to operate for a year without any sales.

"You're trying to bankrupt me," Gates accused Ballmer. After some argument, they hashed out a compromise: Ballmer could hire new employees, but only if the company's revenue grew accordingly.

The issue of revenue growth was quickly mooted as Microsoft became the premier independent software company in an industry that was growing even more dramatically than Gates and Allen had imagined. Ballmer was instrumental in what would be the key business sequence in the company's early history: He helped Gates and Allen secure the purchase of the Disk Operating System (DOS) from a small Seattle firm in 1980. DOS allowed applications software to work on personal computers, and it became the foundation for Microsoft's flagship product, MS-DOS. Ballmer then helped negotiate a landmark deal with International Business Machines to run MS-DOS on IBM's machines -- and on millions of IBM clones.

Gates and Allen remained Microsoft's resident icons and visionaries, but as Microsoft prospered in the 1980s, Ballmer assumed an in-house status to rival theirs. And through Gates and Ballmer's frequent and heated discussions, they thrived -- as if discord galvanized a deeper trust.

Gates and Allen fought a lot, too, and over time it seemed to wear Allen down. "Working with and for Bill can be a very intense process," Allen says diplomatically. Early Microsoft employees remember that Gates and Allen would argue loudly, often over hard-core technology issues, but even over small things. One early employee recalls a "friendly" chess match between the two partners degenerating into a Gates tantrum in which he scattered the pieces on the board.

Over time, the co-founders' relationship grew strained. Allen's hours diminished, especially next to workaholic Gates's and Ballmer's. After a bout with Hodgkin's disease, Allen left Microsoft in 1983.

But Gates is reluctant to lose close friends. He worked hard to repair his relationship with Allen. In 1986, the same year Microsoft's initial public offering sent the co-founders' paper fortunes soaring into the hundreds of millions, Gates and Allen gave Lakeside School $2.2 million to build a science and math center.

A plaque outside the auditorium bears this dedication: "In memory of classmate, friend and fellow explorer, Kent Hood Evans."

With Allen gone, Gates came to rely even more heavily on Ballmer, whose influence quickly expanded to every quadrant as Microsoft became the symbol of the high-tech boom.

In the 1980s, Ballmer helped oversee the team that produced the Windows operating system (engineers recall him stalking the halls at 2 a.m., clapping his hands and screaming, "Yes, yes, yes"). He built and spearheaded one of computing's most aggressive sales organizations ("Get the business, get the business"). He was Microsoft's most rabid cost watchdog ("That's big-shotty," he sniffed to an executive who had bought a cell phone in the late 1980s).

[...]

Philanthropy - Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Main article: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Gates with Bono, Queen Rania of Jordan, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, President Umaru Yar'Adua of Nigeria and others during the Annual Meeting 2008 of the World Economic Forum

Gates studied the work of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, and donated some of his Microsoft stock in 1994 to create the "William H. Gates Foundation." In 2000, Gates and his wife combined three family foundations and Gates donated stock valued at $5 billion to create the charitable Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which was identified by the Funds for NGOs company in 2013, as the world's wealthiest charitable foundation, with assets reportedly valued at more than $34.6 billion.[93][94] The foundation allows benefactors to access information that shows how its money is being spent, unlike other major charitable organizations such as the Wellcome Trust.[95][96] Gates, through his foundation, also donated $20 million to Carnegie Mellon University for a new building to be named Gates Center for Computer Science which opened in 2009.[97][98]

Gates has credited the generosity and extensive philanthropy of David Rockefeller as a major influence. Gates and his father met with Rockefeller several times, and their charity work is partly modeled on the Rockefeller family's philanthropic focus, whereby they are interested in tackling the global problems that are ignored by governments and other organizations.[99] As of 2007, Bill and Melinda Gates were the second-most generous philanthropists in America, having given over $28 billion to charity;[100] the couple plan to eventually donate 95% of their wealth to charity.[101]

The foundation is organized into five program areas: Global Development Division, Global Health Division, United States Division, and Global Policy & Advocacy Division. Among others, it supports a wide range of health projects, granting aid to fight transmissible diseases such AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, as well as widespread vaccine programs to eradicate polio. It grants funds to learning institutes and libraries and supports scholarships at universities. The foundation established a water, sanitation and hygiene program to provide sustainable sanitation services in poor countries.[102] Its agriculture division supports the International Rice Research Institute in developing Golden Rice, a genetically modified rice variant used to combat vitamin A deficiency.[103] The goal of the foundation is to provide 120 million women and girls, in the poorest countries, with high-quality contraceptive information and services, with the longer-term goal of universal access to voluntary family planning.[104] In 2007, the Los Angeles Times criticized the foundation for investing its assets in companies that have been accused of worsening poverty, pollution and pharmaceutical firms that do not sell to developing countries.[105] Although the foundation announced a review of its investments to assess social responsibility,[106] it was subsequently canceled and upheld its policy of investing for maximum return, while using voting rights to influence company practices.[107]

Personal donations

Melinda Gates suggested that people should emulate the philanthropic efforts of the Salwen family, who sold their home and gave away half of its value, as detailed in their book, The Power of Half.[108] Gates and his wife invited Joan Salwen to Seattle to speak about what the family had done, and on December 9, 2010, Bill and Melinda Gates and investor Warren Buffett each signed a commitment they called the "Giving Pledge", which is a commitment by all three to donate at least half of their wealth, over the course of time, to charity.[109][110][111]

Gates has also provided personal donations to educational institutions. In 1999, Gates donated $20 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the construction of a computer laboratory named the "William H. Gates Building" that was designed by architect Frank Gehry. While Microsoft had previously given financial support to the institution, this was the first personal donation received from Gates.[112]

The Maxwell Dworkin Laboratory of the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences is named after the mothers of both Gates and Microsoft President Steven A. Ballmer, both of whom were students (Ballmer was a member of the School's graduating class of 1977, while Gates left his studies for Microsoft), and donated funds for the laboratory's construction.[113] Gates also donated $6 million to the construction of the Gates Computer Science Building, completed in January 1996, on the campus of Stanford University. The building contains the Computer Science Department and the Computer Systems Laboratory (CSL) of Stanford's Engineering department.[114]

Since 2005, Gates and his foundation have taken an interest in solving global sanitation problems. For example, they announced the "Reinvent the Toilet Challenge", which has received considerable media interest.[115] To raise awareness for the topic of sanitation and possible solutions, Gates drank water that was "produced from human feces" in 2014 – in fact it was produced from a sewage sludge treatment process called the Omni Processor.[116][117] In early 2015, he also appeared with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show and challenged him to see if he could taste the difference between this reclaimed water or bottled water.[118]

In November 2017, Gates said he would give $50 million to the Dementia Discovery Fund, a venture capital that seeks treatment for Alzheimer's disease. He also pledged an additional $50 million to start-up ventures working in Alzheimer's research.[119] Bill and Melinda Gates have said that they intend to leave their three children $10 million each as their inheritance. With only $30 million kept in the family, they are expected to give away about 99.96% of their wealth.[120] On August 25, 2018, Gates distributed $600,000 through his foundation via UNICEF which is helping flood affected victims in Kerala, India.[121]

Could you tell us briefly talk about your vision for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation? Early on you gave a great deal to libraries and schools, now global health seems to be a larger focus.

Bill Gates: The Foundation got started in the late '90s, with my dad -- encouraging me -- an executive named Patty Stonesifer, who'd left Microsoft, were helping out. I was still very busy, our kids were very young, but we got going. We put computers in libraries in many different countries, including the United States. We did some scholarship things. We were learning about reproductive health and population issues. And that kept growing, and we met people who knew about vaccines. So it was a part-time thing. Global health was a bit over half; the U.S.-focused libraries, scholarship education work was over a quarter; and it was a final piece that relates to other things to help the poorest, other than just health things, things like finance and savings. And you know, it grew. And then I saw that I could make a unique contribution there, and created a transition plan that was four years in the making. So now I'm full time at the Foundation and playing a role of being the Chairman and traveling a lot. So it's equally challenging, it's very fulfilling. It's taking these resources that I'm lucky enough to have, because of the success of Microsoft, and giving those back to the society in a way that can have the biggest impact.

In your priorities for the Foundation, discovery is one of the first. That's interesting, because it is kind of a parallel to Microsoft. So even in the area of medicine, and vaccines fighting malaria and so forth, you're still focused on discovery.

Bill Gates: Absolutely. We need new vaccines, we need cheap vaccines, we need vaccines that are easy to deliver, even in the poorest places, where something like having refrigerators is tough to do. And it does connect to my experience at Microsoft of finding great scientists, making sure they understand the problems that are important, getting them focused on those things, having milestones, even if there are setbacks, and making sure that -- if the possibility is still there -- that they get the proper backing. This is something that governments don't do much of. They fund a lot of the great delivery -- the foreign aid is very, very important -- but on the discovery side there's been a deep under-investment. Whether it's a malaria vaccine, tuberculosis vaccine, about 20 different diseases that -- if things go well -- we'll have vaccines for most of those within the next decade. So the Foundation is really taking the lead, financing that scientific work, and already some have been discovered. Some are getting out there, but there's a lot more still to be done

Bill Gates : My dad’s not an engineer or scientist. He never really got exposed to that stuff. And so he always said he wished he’d known more about that. That wasn’t the exposure he had. My dad is not big on regrets. There’s really very little in his life that he would regret…. Of course, when my mother passed away [in 1994], that was a very sad thing. Within a few years, my dad was helping out with the [Bill & Melinda Gates] Foundation. He then met Mimi and was lucky enough to get married to her. That has been a great thing for him.

GeekWire: Speaking of the foundation, what skills and strengths did he bring to the foundation that really have made him effective here?

Bill Gates: He and Patty Stonesifer [former co-chair and CEO of the foundation] brought together what initially were fairly small-scale efforts. That was great. In terms of the tone, the principles and things, my dad was quite fantastic. Patty had been an executive at Microsoft, was very capable about setting up the organization….

[In 2000] I put in $20 billion and so then the foundation had a minimum payout of a billion dollars a year. So they had to grow pretty quickly. That’s gone up. Then we had the [Warren] Buffett gift that doubled our resources. My dad’s role initially was very hands-on. As we got bigger, he stayed strongly involved in the community stuff. He stayed more involved in the education, the U.S.-focused stuff.

He did some international trips. I remember he and Jimmy Carter did this great trip to South Africa. That’s one of my favorite photos of my dad. He, Jimmy Carter and Nelson Mandela holding these babies. He went down to Honduras.

It’s fair to say he was way more focused and stayed more engaged in the domestic stuff. He loves the international stuff, he did some work related to that. But he was pretty tilted. He was really super knowledgeable about the Seattle-area stuff and quite knowledgeable about the U.S. stuff. As the global stuff became more scientific, like the malaria vaccine or something like that, he was super supportive, but that was not his hands-on area.