There is no person in the modern world who has not experienced the use of the Windows operating system at least once in his life. Its creator, the world-famous American entrepreneur, philanthropist and public figure Bill Gates, deserves to be one of the most recognizable people in all social strata of the population. It is worth noting that, despite worldwide recognition and fame, Gates has not ceased to be a man who donates more than a third of all proceeds to charity.
Childhood
Bill Gates (full name - William Henry Gates III) was born in 1955 on October 28 in Seattle, Washington. Bill's father, William Gates Sr., worked as a corporate lawyer at a local law firm. Bill's mother, Mary Maxwell, served on the board of directors of Pacific Northwest Bell, First Interstate Bank, and the national council of United Way.
The future creator of Windows Bill Gates was a student of one of the most privileged schools in the city of Seattle, where he managed to achieve high results in programming. He used a school mini-computer for these purposes. Young Bill didn't like grammar and civics, and he didn't like other liberal arts either.
Lack of interest in the social and human sciences, he justified by the fact that he considered these disciplines ordinary and not particularly interesting. But, unlike others, the boy liked math, and he managed to get the highest marks in this difficult subject.
The first difficulties on the path of life
Before graduating from elementary school, Bill started having behavioral and self-control problems. This fact caused great excitement among parents and teachers. In the end, they had to see a psychiatrist.
As Bill Gates himself later said, at that time already the creator of Windows 8, his biography in those years took an unexpected turn. He was wildly obsessed with computers and skipped many lessons in order to sit in a computer class. Quite often, these gatherings continued until 1 a.m., and the average number of hours spent on the device per week was from twenty to thirty.
There was a moment when Bill and his friend Paul Allen did something absolutely crazy, stealing passwords and hacking into the system. For this, the guys were left without a computer, and they had to sit idle for the whole summer.
Studying at Harvard
The future director of the Windows project, the creator of the most modern software, Bill Gates, passed the entrance exams in 1973 and entered Harvard. It was there that he met Steve. Ballmer, who is now the CEO of Microsoft Corporation.
Despite his outstanding ability in math and computer science, Bill didn't like studying very much, and he often skipped classes while doing programming at the same time. At that time, Gates did not stop communicating with Paul Allen. At that time, Paul managed to enter the University of Washington and drop out of it, moving to Boston and starting to work for Honeywell Corporation.
First success
In 1975, Gates and his friend Paul came across an article in Popular Electronics magazine, from which they learned that MITS had created and successfully launched the Altair 8800 computer.
Young people offered MITS services to write software for this computer in the Basic language. The result completely suited the company, and Paul was accepted into the staff, and Bill dropped out of his studies at Harvard and actively began to write software and organize his own company, Micro-Soft. Under this logo, the organization passed state registration in 1976.
Microsoft Windows
Creator of the huge company "Microsoft" Bill Gates made a great contribution to the development of modern technologies in the field of personal computers. In particular, the first sensational OS, MS-DOS, became one of the most prominent projects of the multibillionaire, adapted to the requirements of IBM, which in 1979 made Bill an offer to create an OS for the needs of the world's first PC.
Well, the initial version of the well-known Windows operating system, the creator of which made a lot of efforts to bring it to light, was presented to the public in 1985. The first name used during development, Interface Manager (literally - interface manager), was soon replaced by Windows ("Windows"), as it was best suited to describe the "windows" that were used for calculations on the screen and became the main feature of the new product.
Family life
The future creator of Windows XP, Bill Gates, married Melinda French in 1994, whom he first met in 1987 at a Microsoft press briefing in New York. As it turned out, Melinda had been an employee of the company for a long time and, having married her boss, left her job. Shortly after the wedding, their first daughter, Jennifer, was born.
Melinda is actively involved in charity work. Appearing in public, Bill's wife never gives interviews to journalists, as her private life is very valuable to her. The Gates already have three children.
At the moment, the creator of "Windows 7" and his wife live in the so-called "House of the Future", which is located on forty thousand square feet on the shores of Lake Washington. The house is crammed with all kinds of modern technology and its total cost is about forty million dollars.
Latest version development"Windows"
Since Bill Gates stepped down as CEO in 2008 and took up a position on the board of directors, special departments are involved in the development of the latest editions of the Windows operating system. Gates himself, as such, does not take part in this matter.
In July 2009, Steven Sinofsky was hired as vice president of the Windows division. Better known as the creator of Windows 8, Sinofsky stayed with the company for a relatively short time and left the post and the company at the end of 2012. According to information provided by sources from Microsoft, Stephen could not find a common language with other employees of the corporation. Perhaps this was the main reason for leaving.
At the end of 2015, Bill Gates topped the ranking of the richest people in the United States according to Forbes magazine for the twenty-second time. His fortune is estimated at an incredible $76 billion. Of these, 13% are shares of Microsoft, the rest of the money is indicated by investments in various enterprises. The largest of them: shares of Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Catapillar and others.
Gates has also received recognition as the author of two bestsellers. His book The Road Forward was at number one on The New York Times bestseller lists for seven weeks in 1995. The second book, Business at the Speed of Thought, was published in 1999 and has been translated into twenty-five different languages.around the world.
