Bill Gates III

Ancestors

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Biography

Bill Gates III is Notable.

Bill Gates first took an interest in programming while enrolled in the Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school. In early 1973, he served as a congressional page in the U.S. House of Representatives. He graduated from Lakeside School in 1973 and enrolled at Harvard College. In his sophomore year, he devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems presented in a combinatorics class by one of his professors. His solution held the record as the fastest version for over thirty years.

In 1975, he dropped out of Harvard and formed a partnership called "Micro-Soft" with Paul Allen, a friend from Lakeside School. They wrote a BASIC interpreter for the new the Altair 8800 computer, and on November 26, 1976, they registered the trade name "Microsoft." They moved their company to Bellevue, Washington on January 1, 1979.

When IBM's representatives mentioned in July 1980 that they needed an operating system for their new personal computer, the IBM PC, Bill referred them to the company that marketed CP/M, a widely used operating system. When IBM’s talks with that company didn’t go well, Bill proposed using 86-DOS, a similar operating system designed by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products. Microsoft made a deal with SCP to become the exclusive licensing agent, and later the full owner, of 86-DOS. After adapting the operating system for the PC, Microsoft licensed it to IBM as PC DOS for a one-time fee of $50,000. He kept the copyright, and the sales of MS-DOS made Microsoft a major player in the industry. Microsoft launched its first retail version of Microsoft Windows on November 20, 1985.

Bill was named one of Good Housekeeping '​s "50 Most Eligible Bachelors" in 1985. In 1987 he was listed as a billionaire in Forbes magazine's 400 Richest People in America issue. He was number one on Forbes list of The World's Richest People from 1995 to 2007 and 2009. He married Melinda French on January 1, 1994, and they have three children. She filed an uncontested divorce on May 3, 2021,^[1], with the couple releasing a joint statement announcing their decision.^[2]

In 1994, Bill sold some of his Microsoft stock to create the "William H. Gates Foundation." In 2000, he and his wife combined three family foundations 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. On June 15, 2006, Bill announced that he would transition out of his day-to-day role at Microsoft to dedicate more time to philanthropy.

Sources

1. ↑ https://www.tmz.com/2021/05/03/bill-melinda-gates-divorce-27-years-marriage-foundation/
2. ↑ https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/1389316412259270657

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