biography
| name: |
Gates, Bill
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| |
popular name of William Henry Gates
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1955– )
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| biography:
| Computer engineer and entrepreneur, born in Seattle, Washington, USA. At age 15 he constructed a device to control traffic patterns in Seattle, and in 1975 co-wrote a compiler for BASIC and interested the MITS company in it. He dropped out of Harvard in 1975 to spend his time writing programmes. In 1977, he co-founded Microsoft to develop and produce DOS, his basic operating system for computers. When in 1981 International Business Machines (IBM) adopted DOS for its line of personal computers, his company took a giant step forward; by 1983 he had licensed DOS to more than 100 vendors, making it the dominant operating system. By age 35 he had become one of the wealthiest men in America, and by the late 1990s, the wealthiest. In 1998 the government sued Microsoft for alleged anti-trust violations - a case which was still ongoing in 20032. |
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