Bill Gates

Bill Gates is an American philanthropist, business expert, investor, and the second richest person in the world at the moment. He was the first but was recently overtaken by Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos. We all know Bill as the co-founder of Microsoft, and he has done immense things for the world over the years. However, Bill Gates recently retired from the company and dedicated his life to helping make the world a better place. The foundation he made with his wife is fighting poverty, making education better, and bringing technology to the parts of the world that have very little or none at all.

Bill Gates is certainly one of the most influential people alive today, but when and how did it all start? Did he know just how much he’ll achieve? Today we’ll find out. He was born in 1955 in Seattle, his father being a prominent lawyer, and his mother a businesswoman. He got the nickname Trey, as in third, because his real name is William Henry Gates III. Bill attended Lakeside School, a private preparatory one, and there he saw a computer for the first time. The school bought a Teletype Model 33 terminal and allowed the students to use it.

That’s where his prominent interest in programming started to grow, and he was greatly fascinated, and still is to this day. After the school funds were exhausted, they had to use PDP-10 Mini Computer – later banning Bill Gates, Paul Allen (Co-founder of Microsoft), and two other students for trying to exploit the bugs to gain free computer time. The company behind that PC made a great decision – something big companies do today, hiring hackers to find weaknesses in the code. They did exactly that – gave Bill and his friends extra free time in exchange for studying the source code and finding bugs.

Bill Gates graduated from the school in 1973 as a National Merit Scholar, scoring 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT test, allowing him to enroll at Harvard College. Of course, he took mathematics and computer science courses, and when he was there he met Steve Ballmer, who is one of his best friends today. Ballmer went on to graduate magna cum laude, while Bill Gates dropped out after two years. Ballmer was Microsoft CEO from 2000 until his resignation in 2014.

There’s one great thing about Bill Gates, and it happened during his studies. He devised an algorithm for pancake sorting for an unsolved problem in a class by the professor Harry Lewis. It was so good that it held the record for over thirty years, and when it was finally beaten, the other version was faster by 1% only! In 1974 MITS Altair 8800 came out, based on an Intel 8080 CPU. Because Bill stayed in touch with Paul Allen, they made a deal to utilize this new chip to start their own computer software company, and Microsoft was born.

Nowadays, Bill Gates left day-to-day operations in Microsoft and his position as the richest man was taken by Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO. That came as no surprise, as Jeff is younger and spreading Amazon to things like grocery shopping, bookselling, and stores without actual cashiers – all done with cameras and barcodes. However, it’s far from over for Bill, as he’s focusing on charity and philanthropy at the moment with his wife Melinda. They’re donating computers to students that have less access or live in poverty, as well as trying to fix world’s problems. He said that all the money isn’t worth if it can’t help make it a better place for all of us. We’re applauding Bill Gates’ thinking of pollution, climate change, and investing in tech companies on the rise. Read some more interesting facts before you go.