The Early Years

William Henry Gates III was born on October 28, 1955 to his parents, Bill Gates, Jr.and Mary Gates, members of Seattle's social elite. His father, having risen through the legal ranks was a partner in the firm of Shidler, McBroom, Gates, and Lucas. His mother, a teacher by trade, worked in volunteer public service, landing positions on the boards of several of the Northwest's largest corporations. Young Bill, more commonly referred to as Trey due to the III behind his name, would never know financial hardship. His grandparents, Willard Maxwell and Adelle Thompson on his mother's side, would even establish a million dollar trust fund for the young man.

Having demonstrated a gifted intelligence, Bill was enrolled in the private all-boys preparatory school Lakeside at the age of eleven, where he would continue schooling up until college. Bill would discover and cultivate his love for computers at Lakeside and also meet his friend and future Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Creating BASIC programs using a teletype machine linked to a succession of PDP-10 minicomputers, Bill, and a select group of other students in the Lakeside Programmers Group (LPG) including Allen, developed their computer expertise, much to the dismay of Lakeside parents who often had to foot the bill for the expensive computer time. However, the experience of the boys led them to jobs with the Computer Center Corporation (also referred to as C-Cubed), Information Sciences Inc. (ISI), and Lakeside itself performing software testing or developing programs often in exchange for free computer time.

Always seeking means to use their computer knowledge to make money, Allen and Gates founded a company called Traf-O-Data in 1971 after Allen had enrolled at the University of Washington. The company, which developed programs to translate raw traffic-related data to usable statistical information, had limited success and eventually dissolved after the government began performing the same tasks for free. However, it was a start and encouraged the young men to look outside of the United States for growth prospects, a perspective that would benefit them immensely later. Building on their earlier work with C-Cubed, the young men landed jobs with the defense contractor, TRW. Allen eventually dropped out of the university and remained on with TRW while Bill returned to school at Lakeside.

After scoring a perfect 800 on the math portion of his college entrance exams, Gates enrolled at Harvard in the fall of 1973. Though taking many advanced courses, Gates had a much greater interest in poker and programming. In the summer of 1974, Gates landed a job at Honeywell and referred them to Allen, who was hired on as well shortly thereafter. Once again, Gates would return to school at Harvard while Allen remained at Honeywell. While at Harvard, Bill met and befriended a fellow mathematics enthusiast, Steve Ballmer. A social extrovert, Ballmer would prove to be a polar opposite from the introverted Gates and served as Gates' entrance into many of Harvard's social circles. However, both men shared an energy and drive that is common between them to this day.

MITS and the Altair