Bill Gates Childhood and schooling.

 

William Henry Gates III, the sole child of William H. Gates Sr.[b] (1925–2020) and his first wife Mary Maxwell Gates (1929–1994), was born in Seattle, Washington, on October 28, 1955. He has German, Irish/Scots-Irish, and English ancestry. His mother was on the boards of United Way of America and First Interstate BancSystem, and his father was a well-known attorney. J. W. Maxwell was the president of a big bank and Gates's maternal grandfather. He also has a younger sister named Libby and an elder sister named Kristi (Kristianne). Despite being the fourth person in his family with that name, he goes by William Gates III or "Trey" (i.e., three) because his father had the suffix "II" added to his name. When Gates was seven years old, their home in Seattle's Sand Point neighbourhood was destroyed by an uncommon tornado.

When Gates was younger, his parents encouraged him to become a lawyer. His family belonged to the Protestant Reformed Congregational Christian Churches, which he frequently attended as a child. Gates was teased as a child because he was undersized for his age. One guest said that "it didn't matter whether it was hearts or pickleball or swimming to the dock; there was always a reward for winning and there was always a penalty for losing" indicating that the family promoted competitiveness.

He wrote his first piece of software when he was thirteen years old and enrolled in the exclusive Lakeside prep school. When he was in eighth grade, the school's Mothers' Club purchased a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time for the children on a General Electric (GE) computer with the money they raised from a rummage sale at Lakeside School. Gates was allowed to skip maths classes in order to pursue his passion in programming the GE system in BASIC. 

On this system, he built his first computer programme, which was an application that let people play games against the computer in the style of tic tac toe. The machine's flawless execution of software code always captivated Gates. Gates and other students sought time on systems, including DEC PDP minicomputers, after the Mothers Club grant ran out. One of these systems was a PDP-10 owned by Computer Centre Corporation (CCC), which, upon discovering that Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and his closest friend and first business partner, Kent Evans, were abusing operating system flaws to get free computer time, suspended them for the summer.

To earn money, the four students founded the Lakeside Programmers Club. When the prohibition ended, they offered more computer time in exchange for finding vulnerabilities in CCC's software. Gates travelled to CCC's headquarters and studied the source code for different programmes that ran on the system, such as Fortran, Lisp, and machine language, instead of utilising the system remotely via Teletype. The agreement with CCC persisted until the business's demise in 1970. The next year, in exchange for computer time and royalties, a Lakeside teacher hired Gates and Evans to automate the school's class scheduling system. Together, they put in a lot of work to get the programme ready for their senior year. One of the worst days of Gates' life was when Evans was murdered in a mountain climbing accident towards the conclusion of their junior year. After that, he turned to Allen, who assisted him in completing the Lakeside system.

When Gates was seventeen, he and Allen founded Traf-O-Data, a company that produced traffic counters built on the Intel 8008 CPU. He was a congressional page in the House of Representatives during 1972. When he graduated from Lakeside School in 1973, he was recognised as a national merit scholar. After receiving a score of 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT, he enrolled in Harvard College for the autumn of 1973. He did not stay at Harvard long enough to select a specialty, but he did take graduate-level computer science classes and mathematics courses, including Math 55. He made the acquaintance of future Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer as a student at Harvard. Ballmer continued at Harvard and received a magna cum laude degree, whereas Gates left after two years. A few years later, Ballmer took Gates' place as Microsoft's CEO, a role he held until his resignation in 2014.

Professor Harry Lewis's combinatorics class featured a number of unsolved issues, which Gates used as inspiration to create an algorithm for pancake sorting. For more than thirty years, his solution was the fastest; its replacement is barely 2% faster. In association with Harvard computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou, his solution was codified and published.

Paul Allen stayed in touch with Gates, who spent the summer of 1974 working with him at Honeywell. When the Intel 8080 CPU-based MITS Altair 8800 was introduced in 1975, Gates and Allen recognised an opening to launch their own computer software business. In the same year, Gates left Harvard University. When his parents realised how much he wanted to launch his own business, they became supportive of him. He gave this justification for leaving Harvard: "I could have always returned to school if things hadn't worked out. Officially, I was off.