The man, myth and legend of tech and philanthropy — founder of Microsoft and cofounder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — reflects on his trailblazing work with computer software, starting the largest private philanthropic foundation ever and cooperating with a Netflix docuseries.
Gates was born in Seattle, Wash., to a lawyer and schoolteacher, and, as he readily admits, "By age 13, I was an extreme nerd." It was then that he entered seventh grade and used a computer for the first time. He and three friends, including, who was two years his senior, taught themselves how to operate a primitive device that their school had purchased, and became good enough that they were retained by the school to use the computer to map out class schedules for all students.
Among Microsoft's early clients was IBM, which Gates says was even "more dominant" in the personal computer field at the time than Microsoft is in the computer software area today. But IBM made a fatal mistake by focusing on hardware instead of software, allowing Microsoft to sell its software to other companies in return for foregoing royalties for sales of IBM computers armed with Microsoft software.
Microsoft went public in 1986, leaving Gates with "kind of a ridiculous amount of money." The company's hallmark software package, starting in the mid-eighties was Windows, but the version it released in 1995 — Windows 95 — proved a game-changer in a way that no computer software package ever had before. "People realized, 'Okay, the graphical approach is the right approach,' and it just wiped out the previous way of interacting with a machine," Gates explains.
In 2000, Gates stepped down as Microsoft's CEO, and in 2008 he began transitioning out of a day-to-day role at the company and into an advisory one. This was all so that he — by that time the richest man in the world — could focus full-time on philanthropy. He had started the William H.
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