Gates, Bill ( William Henry Gates III; 1955– )
US computer entrepreneur, who became the richest man in the world.Born in Seattle, Washington, Gates was educated at Harvard. His career in computers began when he founded Microsoft at the age of twenty-one. From another company he acquired a software system that, after adaptation, he renamed MS-DOS. When IBM took MS-DOS as the operating system for their PCs the foundation for Gates's wealth was laid. Because the IBM PC was widely imitated by other manufacturers, the MS-DOS software system on which it depended was widely used throughout the world. This generated enormous royalties for Microsoft, which Gates used to fund the research and development for regular upgrades of MS-DOS and for further software systems. By ... ...
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