Berlin - Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates laid the cornerstone of his success with Windows, the operating system used by nearly all of the world’s PCs.
Thirty years since Windows’ debut and 20 since the introduction of the game-changing Windows 95, the operating system is still a cash cow for the software company - and has made Gates the richest man in the world.
His fortune is currently estimated at more than $79 billion.
Despite his great success, Gates has always been a man who shunned public appearances.
Born in 1955 near Seattle in the US state of Washington, Gates is the son of lawyer William H. Gates II and the teacher Mary Maxwell Gates.
He developed a passion for computers while still in school.
At the time there were no personal computers, but it was possible to rent computing time at large companies that had them. He and his somewhat older school friend Paul Allen spent every free minute on the computer.
In the 1970s, when Gates was a student at Harvard University, he and Allen set out to adapt the BASIC programming language to run on the Altair 8800, one of the first microcomputers.
By 1975, he had dropped out of Harvard to devote more time to their small company, originally named Micro-Soft. It was officially founded on April 4, 1975.
Their first big break was a major order from IBM, a contract to deliver an operating system for the company’s forthcoming personal computers.
Gates paid about $50 000 for the rights to the QDOS system - an abbreviation for “Quick and Dirty OS”. He developed it further and renamed it MS-DOS - Microsoft disk operating system.
That was the beginning of the PC era - and the first step toward realising Gates’ vision of “a computer on every desk and in every home”.
With the success of the Windows operating system, Microsoft grew to become a global corporation.
But at the height of his success - and after major disputes with competition regulators - Gates stepped down as Microsoft chief executive in the year 2000, handing over the position to his college friend Steve Ballmer.
In 2008, at the age of 53, Gates gave up his full-time role at the company to focus on his philanthropic work. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation he founded with his wife fights diseases like malaria and HIV. He remains chairman of Microsoft’s board.
Microsoft’s current chief executive Satya Nadella took the reins of the company from the somewhat luckless Ballmer in February 2014 and hopes to lead the business into a new era.
With Windows 10, which was released at the end of July, Nadella also wants to move forward from Windows Vista and Windows 8, which flopped over unpopular redesigns and security features.
The Indian-born software specialist is redirecting the company’s focus to cloud computing - and in the process, he’s breaking down some old barriers: the Office 2016 software package was released first for users of rival Apple’s Macs.
DPA-ANA