Jeyden Mora

Block 6
9/11/15
Bill Gates Report
Bill Gates was born William Henry Gates III on October 28, 1955, in Seattle,
Washington. He began having a big interest in computers at the age of 13 at Lakeside School,
and honed his passion during his freshman of college. He grew up with two sisters, Kristianne
and Libby, who are older and younger than him. His parents, William H. Gates Sr. and Mary
Maxwell, noticed that Bill had a big sense of competitiveness at a very early age when the family
competed in athletic games at Puget Sound, the familys summer home. Fun fact: Bill Gates was
also very talented at Monopoly.
At Lakeside School in Seattle, Bill met his future partner, Paul Allen. Allen dropped out
after two years at Seattle State University, and Gates joined him soon after by dropping out of
Harvard. Gates didnt spend much time in class, rather in the computer lab. Finally, on April 4,
1975, Gates and Allen established the company that is now Microsoft. It was becoming a huge
success, and in November of 1980, IBM was in search of a software that could operate their
latest computer. They went to Bill and Paul, but Gates didnt have the basic system that would
run the computers. He later bought a system that was developed to run computers similar to
IBMs. To go further, Gates created Softcard, which would let Microsoft BASIC to function on
Apple II machines. During 1978 and 1981, revenue increased four times, from 4 to $6 million,
and staff members increased from 25 to 128. Microsoft had done deals with Great Britain and
Japan, and 30% of the worlds computers ran on Microsoft.