William Henry "Bill" Gates III was born October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington, to William H. Gates, Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates; his father was a prominent lawyer, his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way. They always had in mind a law career for him.

At 13 he joined the Lakeside School, where he had his first meeting with computers machine, when he participated in programming the processor his school bought. He also met there his future co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen.

Gates graduated from there in 1973 and he enrolled at Harvard College in 1973. While at there, he met his future business partner, Steve Ballmer, whom he later appointed as CEO of Microsoft.

Remaining in touch with Allen and with the release of the MITS Altair 8800 based on the Intel 8080 CPU, Gates and Allen saw this as the opportunity to start their own computer software company.

In 1975 they met MITS president Ed Roberts, and started to work in a partnership with the company. They named their partnership "Micro-Soft" and had their first office located in Albuquerque.

Microsoft became independent of MITS in late 1976, and it continued to develop programming language software for various systems. The company moved from Albuquerque to its new home in Bellevue, Washington in 1979.

During Microsoft's early years, all employees had broad responsibility for the company's business. Gates oversaw the business details, but continued to write code as well.

Thanks to the IBM partnership, in 1980, they started to develop an innovative operating system, the PC-DOS and in few times Microsoft became the major player in the industry.

In 1981 he restructured Microsoft and he became President and Chairman of the Board.

The history of the company is a very successful one, and its operating systems are the most used and common by all computer users.

The great success of the company have mad Gates earn a lot: he was number one on the "Forbes 400" list from 1993 through to 2007.

In 1994 Gates married Melinda French and they have three children: Jennifer Katharine (1996), Rory John (1999) and Phoebe Adele (2002).

In In the later stages of his career, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000.

In 2006 he announced that he would be transitioning from full-time work at Microsoft to part-time work and full-time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and left the Board to his colleague Steve Ballmer.