Bill+Gates+(Ashley+Postma)



1. **1968**- Lakeside School, where Bill Gates attended, had very expensive computer from General Electric. Gates and his friends at Lakeside were fascinated with the machines and formed the Lakeside Programmers Group. Gates and Allen then formed a formed a company that they called Traf-O-Data which measured traffic flow and made them about $20,000. They kept this company until they graduated from high school.

2. **1975**- Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Altair computer made by a New Mexico company called MITS. Using a book that described the machine, Gates and Allen adapted BASIC computer language to write a program that would fit into the Altair's memory. They did not own an Altair so they had to write and test their BASIC interpreter on a simulator program. When their program was presented to MITS it worked on the first try. Gates dropped out of Harvard to concentrate on his new business full time. Gates and Allen co-founded Microsoft and wrote programs for the early Apple and Commodore machines.

3. **1980**- Gates was asked by International Business Machines (IBM) to develop an operating system for its PC project. He and his team rewrote and made adjustments to an operating system called "Q-DOS" designed by a Seattle programmer. The result was renamed MS-DOS and had become the industry standard and the basis for future software development. By 1984 over two million copies of MS-DOS were sold, and more than one hundred million copies by the early 1990's making the operating system the all-time leader in software sales.

4. **1983**- Gates realized that a mouse driven computer system with a user interface based on graphics rather than the keyboard based and text driven system of MS-DOS would be the wave of the future. He created the next generation system called "Windows". Windows 1.0 was released in 1985 and Microsoft reported $140 million in revenue. Microsoft's growth would continue to be relatively smooth.

5. **1994**- Bill Gates and his wife Melinda established the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In November 1998 they donated $20 million to the Seattle Public Library. On July 12, 2000, the foundation announced nearly $50 million in grants to help prevent the transmission of AIDS. In July 2005, the foundation announced it would donate $287 million to 16 group of scientists to fund research into a vaccine against HIV. In April of 2006, the foundation donated $75 million to the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health to fund development of an anti-pneumonia vaccine. In early 2011, Gates announced that the foundation would focus on completely eradicating polio and giving vaccinations to the world's poorest children. By 2011 Bill and Melinda Gates had given away more than $28 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.

6. **2004**- In January, Gates met with the Queen of England at the Buckingham Palace. He was given an insignia to make him an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. He received this knighthood as recognition for his business skills for his work on poverty reduction.



7. **2****009**- Gates was ranked the richest person in world by Forbes magazine for the fourteenth time. He was ranked the richest person even though he lost $18 billion in the previous 10 months. More than half of his fortune is invested outside of Microsoft. In 2007 Gates's personal worth was estimated at more than $57 billion.

8. **2010 **- Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet created the Giving Pledge. The Giving Pledge is a pledge that other billionaires can sign to indicate that they promise to give away at least half of their fortunes to charity. These wealthy individuals and families carry on the inspiration from other givers past and present to give generously to make the world a better place.

"Bill Gates." //Forbes//. Forbes Magazine. Web. 31 May 2012. .

"Knighthood for Microsoft's Gates." //BBC News//. BBC, 03 Feb. 2005. Web. 31 May 2012. .

McGuire, William, and Leslie Wheeler. "Bill Gates." // American History //. ABC-CLIO, 2012. Web. 31 May 2012.

"William Henry Gates, III." // Encyclopedia of World Biography //. Detroit: Gale, 1998. // Gale Biography In Context //. Web. 31 May 2012.