BORN: October 28, 1955
NATIVE CITY: Seattle, Washington
EDUCATION: Public elementary school. Entered private Lakeside School at age twelve. Dropped out of Harvard University junior year.
LITTLE KNOWN FACT: His family called him "Trey," in reference to the III after his name.
HOBBIES: Bridge, golf, reading, philanthropy. Donated $6 billion to his charitable foundation in August 1999, the largest bequest ever by a living individual.
FAMILY: wife, Melinda; daughter, Jennifer, born 1996; son, Rory, born 1999.

                Skinny, shy and awkward, teenaged Bill Gates seemed an unlikely successor to his
overachieving parents. His father, powerfully built and 6'6'' tall, was a prominent Seattle attorney, and his gregarious mother served on charitable boards and ran the United Way. While he showed enormous talent for math and logic, young Bill, a middle child, was no one's idea of a natural leader, let alone a future billionaire who would reinvent American business. Gates set off for Harvard University intending to become a lawyer like his father. Still shy and awkward, he rarely ventured out to parties unless dragged by his friend Steve Ballmer, whom he later repaid by naming him president of Microsoft. One day in December 1974, Allen, who was working at Honeywell outside of Boston, showed Gates a Popular Mechanics cover featuring the Altair 8800, a $397 computer from M.I.T.S. computing that any hobbyist could build. The only thing the computer lacked, besides a keyboard and monitor, was software. Gates and Allen contacted the head of M.I.T.S. and said they could provide a version of BASIC for the Altair. In his junior year, Gates dropped out of Harvard to devote his energies to Microsoft, a company he had begun in 1975 with Paul Allen. Guided by a belief that the personal computer would be a valuable tool on every office desktop and in every home, they
began developing software for personal computers.
               
             Gates' foresight and vision regarding personal computing have been central to the success of Microsoft and the software industry. Gates is actively involved in key management and strategic decisions at Microsoft, and plays an important role in the technical development of new products. A significant portion of his time is devoted to meeting with customers and staying in contact with Microsoft employees around the world through e-mail. Under Gates' leadership, Microsoft's mission is to continually advance and improve software technology and to make it easier, more cost-effective and more enjoyable for people to use computers. The company is committed to a long-term view, reflected in its investment of more than $3 billion on research and development in the current fiscal year.

Microsoft continued concentrating on the software market, adding consumer applications like Microsoft Word. In 1986, when the company went public, Gates became a paper billionaire at the age of thirty-one. The following year, the company introduced its first version of Windows, and by 1993 was selling a million copies a month. When Windows 95 was introduced in August 1995, 7 million copies were sold in the first six weeks alone. Microsoft's software became so ubiquitous that the U.S. Justice Department began a series of long-lasting antitrust investigations against the company, bogging it down in protracted legal battles. In 1995, Gates dramatically changed the direction of the entire company and focused on the Internet. While some of his efforts, including the much hyped Microsoft Network and its highly touted Web "shows", fizzled, the company quickly gained ground on Netscape with its popular Internet Explorer browser.Meanwhile, Gates built a 40,000-square-foot technological showcase of a home on Lake Washington and in 1994, married Melinda French, a marketing executive at Microsoft. At the same time, Gates increased his charitable giving, setting aside $17 billion in endowments for the William H. Gates Foundation (later renamed the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), which promotes increased access to innovative technology in education and global health, as well as promoting community projects in the Pacific Northwest. He earmarked $6 billion in August 1999 to speed the development and reduce costs of vaccines for malaria, tuberculosis, and AIDS.

In 1999, Gates wrote Business @ the Speed of Thought, a book that shows how digital processes can solve business problems in fundamentally new ways. Co-authored by Collins Hemingway, the book was published in 25 languages and is available in more than 60 countries. Business @ the Speed of Thought has received wide critical acclaim and was listed on the best-seller lists of the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and Amazon.com. Gates' previous book, The Road Ahead, published in 1995, held the No. 1 spot on the New York Times' bestseller list for seven weeks.

Gates has donated the proceeds of both books to non-profit organizations that support the use of technology in education and skills development. In addition to his passion for computers, Gates is interested in biotechnology. He sits on the board of the Icos Corporation and is a shareholder in Darwin Molecular, a subsidiary of British-based Chiroscience. He also founded Corbis Corporation, which is developing one of the largest resources of visual information in the world-a comprehensive digital archive of art and photography from public and private collections around the globe. Gates also has invested with cellular telephone pioneer Craig McCaw in Teledesic, a company that is working on an ambitious plan to launch hundreds of low-orbit satellites around the globe to provide worldwide two-way broadband telecommunications service.Bill and Melinda Gates have endowed a foundation with more than $17 billion to support philanthropic initiatives in the areas of global health and learning, with the hope that as we move into the 21st century, advances in these critical areas will be available for all people. To date, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has committed more than $300 million to organizations working in global health; more than $300 million to improve learning opportunities, including the Gates Library Initiative to bring computers, Internet Access and training to public libraries in low-income communities in the United States and Canada; more than $54 million to community projects in the Pacific Northwest; and more than $29 million to special projects and annual giving campaigns. Gates is an avid reader and enjoys playing golf and bridge.

']]A Site Dedicated to the man of Ideas...