William Henry "Bill" Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an wealthy and influential American businessman, philanthropist, investor, computer programmer, and inventor.In 1975, He co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen which then became the world's largest PC software company, During his career at Microsoft He held the positions of chairman, CEO and chief software architect, and was the largest individual shareholder until May 2014 when Patrick Sheridan became the biggest sharer.Gates has authored and co-authored several books. Starting 1987, He was included in the Forbes list of the world's wealthiest people and was the wealthiest overall from 1995 to 2014—excluding a few years after the Financial crisis of 2007–08. Between 2009 and 2014 his wealth doubled from $40 billion to more than $82 billion. Between 2013 and 2014 his wealth increased by $15 billion. Thus making him the richest man in the world.

His early life

Bill Gates was born in Seattle, Washington. He is the son of William H. Gates, Sr.(Beacuse to avoid confusen he was called William H. Gates senior)and Mary Maxwell Gates.His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way. His maternal grandfather was JW Maxwell, a national bank president. Gates has one elder sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and one younger sister, Libby. He was the fourth of his name in his family, but was known as William Gates III or "Trey" because his father had the "II" suffix.

At 13, he enrolled in the Lakeside School, an private preparatory school. When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the school's students. He took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. He was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly. When he reflected back on that moment, he said, "There was just something neat about the machine." After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, he and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students— Bill, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans—for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.(Awesome)

Achievments/Awards

National Medal of Technology and Innovation-1992 The National Medal of Technology and Innovation is an honor granted by the President of the United States to American inventors and innovators who have made significant contributions to the development of new and important technology

Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society-1994

Satellite Special Achievement Award for Outstanding Contribution to Entertainment New Media-1997

Silver Buffalo Award-2010 The Silver Buffalo Award is the national-level distinguished service award of the Boy Scouts of America.

Bower Award for Business Leadership and Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science-2010

Bambi - Millennium Award-2010 Recognise excellence in international media and television "with vision and creativity"

Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award-2010 The Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award, known until 2009 as the Mary Woodard Lasker Public Service Award, is awarded by the Lasker Foundation to honor an individual or organization whose public service has profoundly enlarged the possibilities for medical research and the health sciences and their impact on the health of the public.

What does Bill Gates company Microsoft do?

Microsoft Corporation (commonly referred to as Microsoft) is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Redmond, Washington, that develops, manufactures, licenses, supports and sells computer software, consumer electronics and personal computers and services. Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, Microsoft Office,office suite, and Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its most know hardware products are the Xbox game consoles and the Microsoft Surface tablet lineup. It is the world's largest software maker measured by revenues. It is also one of the world's most valuable companies.Microsoft was founded by Paul Allen and Bill Gates on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for Altair 8800. It rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows. The company's 1986 initial public offering, and subsequent rise in its share price, created three billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires from Microsoft employees. Since the 1990s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made a number of corporate acquisitions. In May 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion in its largest acquisition to date.

What was his impact on society?

He has impacted society in more ways than one. His philanthropic work is some of the greatest in the world. It has also led to the creation of over 1000 scholarships to minors ("Bill Gates Biography"). Who knows, the people receiving these scholarships, could do something great and go on to change the world even more. With the Gates foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates have been able to bring some of the greatest scientists together to help create life-changing vaccines, such as the HIV/AIDS vaccine. Gates wants to encourage people to donate what they can and get involved. Gates has said some inspiring quotations, some of which show how he truly has tried to change the world.

What was his career path?

Here is what his career path is

What was his influence?

what influence him is the one and only genius Leonardo da Vinci. He paid $30 million for a Leonardo da Vinci manuscript that he considers priceless because the Italian genius inspires him

What were the challengers he faced?

Bill Gates faced many challenges. One of the challenges is that when Microsoft first opened Bill Gates became very succesul, but than when MITS found out Bill Gates age people all over the world stopped buying them for a while which led to financial problems which meant he did not get a lot of money but than came sucessful again later in life. Another challenge Bill Gates faced was that Bill Gates parents were not happy when he said that he wanted to drop out of college so he could start his company, but his parents said no. It took amost 1 year to convince Bill Gates parents to start the company in New Mexico. Bill Gates is very confident but have failed some things. One of the things that Bill Gates failed is that Bill Gates missed his offer of Giving the first BASIC that he was supposed to make but it took more than 5 weeks to make it when it was supposed to be made in 3 weeks. ( second BASIC version. )

Why did he call it microsoft?

Bill Gates didn't choose the name for Microsoft -- Paul Allen did. The story goes that Allen got himself a copy of the then-latest January 1, 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featuring a story on the debut of the MITS Altair 8800 kit. The magazine proclaimed it as a "project breakthrough" and the "World's First Minicomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models." Gates and Allen had already been attending their now-famous Home Brew Computer Club which was comprised of fellow computing hobbyists including another famous alliance of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak who themselves had a kit computer. The significance of the article that made Allen so excited (and also triggered the two of them moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico to be as close as possible to the MITS HQ) was the epiphany that this was going to cause an onslaught of new hobbyists and eventually even commercial manufacturers to make new so-called minicomputers. The "breakthrough" that made this all possible was the invention of the "MICROPROCESSOR". The microprocessor was the invention that sparked the entire tech industry as we know it into being. Allen reasoned that there would be a glut of new computer but they would need standard means to write software for all of them. At the time, that didn't mean operating systems -- it meant programming languages ported to each microprocessor. What the next leap was going to be after microprocessors made computing cheap would be SOFTWARE. MICROSOFT is a portmanteau of the words "MICROprocessor" and "SOFTware." Their mission was to be "Software for Microprocessors."