William (Bill) Henry Gates was born on October 28, 1955. His father, a lawyer, and his mother a teacher at The University of Washington, found out early in his life that Bill Gates had inherited the trait of ambition and intelligence. Throughout his life he has helped the progress of our electronic world to hurl itself into the unexplored regions of cyberspace. Since 1963, and the invention of the PDP-8, considered to be the first mini computer, the technology in computer concepts has moved at an unbelievable pace. The world is moving on, and with it is computer technology. Many people have contributed to this widespread movement of computers, but maybe not so much as Bill Gates. Through out his life Bill Gates has produced a sense of greatness. With his many contributions to the computer age, Bill Gates has shown that he was a man of genius, invention, and power.
Because of his superior intelligence, Bill Gates was sent to a private school named Lakeside, where academics were taken very seriously. (History of Bill Gates) It was at Lakeside that Bill was introduced to computers. In the spring of 1968, the Lakeside prep school decided that it should acquaint the student body with the world of computers. Back then computers were too large and costly for the school to purchase. Instead, the school had a fundraiser and bought computer time on a DEC PDP-10 that was owned by General Electric. With a few thousand dollars raised from the fundraiser, the school figured that would buy efficient time enough to last the year. However, Lakeside had drastically underestimated the time that the young Bill Gates would spend on this machine. He and other students would spend all day and night, learning, and writing programming from any literature they could find. Within a few weeks of learning about computers, the students had used up all of the school's bought time. (Before Microsoft) It was not soon after, that Bill and a few friends found a local company that allowed them computer time in exchange for debugging a large computer that the company had bought.