Bill Gates

After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Science that demonstrated the Altair 8700, Gates called the creators of the new microcomputer, MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), to inform them that he and others had developed a version of the programming language BASIC for the platform. Allen flew to MITS to unveil the new BASIC system. Allen had never handled an Altair, since Gates had done all of the actual product development, but the demonstration was successful, and resulted in a deal with MITS to buy the rights to Allen's and Gates' BASIC for the Altair platform. At this point Gates left Harvard and founded Micro-Soft with Allen, which was later re-named as the Microsoft Corporation. In February 1976, Bill Gates published a polemic, the "Open Letter to Hobbyists", that expressed his frustration over his belief that the majority of people using the software were not paying for it.

On August 12, 1981, after negotiations with Digital Research failed, IBM awarded a contract to Microsoft for a version of CP/M, an early operating system (OS), set to be used for the upcoming IBM Personal Computer (PC). However, Microsoft had no OS at the time, so they purchased a CP/M clone called QDOS ("Quick and Dirty Operating System") from Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products for $56,000, which Microsoft renamed to PC-DOS.

In 1984, Bill Gates was featured for the first time on the cover of TIME.Later, after Compaq successfully cloned the IBM BIOS, the market saw a flood of IBM PC clones. Microsoft was quick to use its position to dominate the home computer operating system market. Microsoft began licensing its OS for use on non-IBM PC clones, and called that version MS-DOS (for Microsoft Disk Operating System). By marketing MS-DOS aggressively to manufacturers of IBM-PC clones, Microsoft went from a small player to one of the major software vendors in the home computer industry.

Microsoft continued to develop operating systems as well as software applications. By the late-1980s, their graphical user interface operating system, Microsoft Windows had begun to make serious headway into the software market. The release of Windows 3.0 in 1990 was a tremendous success, selling around 10 million copies in the first two years and cementing Microsoft dominance in operating systems. (See History of Microsoft Windows for more details)

Microsoft eventually went on to be the largest software company in the world, earning Gates enough money to make him the wealthiest person in the world (according to Forbes Magazine) for several years. Gates served as the CEO of the company until 1998 when Steve Ballmer took the position. Gates continues to serve as a chairman of the board at the company and also as a position he created for himself entitled "Chief Software Architect".