Bill Gates:  The Man Who Has Everything

What do you give a man who has been named by Forbes as the world’s wealthiest person?  A man who has a current net worth of over $50 billion?  A man whose Lake Washington spread has been estimated at $125 million?  A man whom Time Magazine dubbed as one of the most influential people in the 20^th century?  A man who has three honorary doctorate degrees from three different universities?  A man who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth the II in year 2005?
I don’t know about his wife, Melinda and his three children, Jennifer Katharine, Rory John and Phoebe Adele, but I’d sure be stumped if I were asked to give Bill Gates something, for his birthday and such specials occasions.  I will certainly not send him email on how to get out of debt or how to get rich quick schemes as some spammers are allegedly wont to do.  Indeed, it seems that if ever a model for a man who has everything is needed, Bill Gates is it.

The Proverbial Silver Spoon in His Mouth:  Privileged Bill

Bill Gates, though he has been perceived as the archetypal nerd, has a not-so-unassuming name.  He was born to privilege as William Henry Gates III.  His father is William Gates, a renowned lawyer, and his mother is Mary Maxwell Gates, a First Interstate Bank’s director.
He was a society kid through and through, who studied at one of the country’s most exclusive (read:  most expensive) preparatory schools, Lakeside School, whose tuition even exceeded that of Harvard at that time.

The Budding Entrepreneur:  Nerdy Bill

Young Bill was inordinately interested in computers and programming.  He extensively studied the programming code for the GE computer at his school.  When caught and subsequently banned by the Computer Center Corporation for using operating system bugs to get free computer time from this corporation’s minicomputer, Bill and friends offered to become CCCs software testers.  Bill began his long-term romance with source codes then.  When CCC closed, Bill and friends were hired by Information Sciences Inc. to write a payroll program.  He also coauthored the Traf-O-Data traffic counters and contracted more clients.  This particular venture earned him around 20,000 dollars even at his tender age.

Microsoft:  Boss Bill

In 1975 Micro-soft was formed in partnership with his Traf-O-Data partner.  It was born when they were contracted by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) to write the code for the company’s Altair 8800.
When IBM contacted Microsoft to find and operating system for the IBM PC, they bought and modified the Seattle Computer Product’s (SCP) operating system, sold it to IBM as PC-DOS and licensed it as MS-DOS to other IBM PC clone manufacturers.
In the 1980s, Windows was born after Microsoft copied and modified the Graphical User Interface operating systems developed by Xerox and Apple.  In the 1990s, MS Windows 3.0 dominated the market at over 10 million copies sold in the first two years of its release.  Sound, and some say unethical business practices, like making sure that most computers manufactured and sold to consumers had MS Windows for its operating system ensured that Microsoft become the biggest and the most successful software company that the world has ever known. Currently, Bill Gates is the chairman of Microsoft.  He is in semi-retirement now but continues to be at the helm of product strategy and management of this software giant.