ChronoFive
Play today’s puzzle
Setting the scene
William Henry Gates III was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington, to a prominent lawyer's family. He programmed a PDP-10 at Lakeside School at 13 and met future partner Paul Allen there.
What happened
Gates dropped out of Harvard in 1975 to found Microsoft with Allen, licensing MS-DOS to IBM for the 1981 PC and dominating software with Windows by the 1990s. He became the world's richest person for years before shifting to philanthropy.
Why it still matters
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has funded global health, vaccines, and education with tens of billions of dollars. Memorable detail: Gates wrote the Altair BASIC interpreter on a tight deadline in 1975, reportedly working without the actual Altair machine—he simulated it on paper and nailed the demo.
Background
Windows dominated PC software for decades.