1955: William Henry Gates III is born to attorney William Henry Gates II and Mary Gates, a schoolteacher, University of Washington regent and chairwoman of United Way International. He is raised in Seattle.

1967: Gates is enrolled in the Lakeside School, an exclusive private school in Seattle, where he befriends Paul Allen. The two students share an interest in computers and programming. The school notices his knack for technology and asks him to create a computerized schedule of classes.

1987: At age 31, Gates becomes the youngest billionaire ever. He meets his future wife, Melinda French, at a Microsoft event in New York.

1995: In July, at age 39 and with a fortune of $12.9 billion, Gates becomes the world’s richest man. Later that summer, Microsoft introduces Internet Explorer to the world, as part of Windows 95. The Road Ahead, Gates’ book about his vision for the digital future, holds the No. 1 spot on The New York Times best-seller list for seven weeks. Gates begins to shift Microsoft’s focus toward the emerging Internet.

1998: In Belgium, on his way to meet business and government leaders, Gates is hit in the face with a cream pie. The incident was orchestrated by Noel Godin, a Belgian who gained notoriety for throwing pies at high-profile individuals. Godin was quoted saying the incident was an act “against hierarchical power.” In May, the U.S. Justice Department charges Microsoft with engaging in anticompetitive and exclusionary practices designed to maintain its monopoly in personal computer operating systems and to extend that monopoly to Internet browsing software. Twenty state attorneys general and the District of Columbia filed a similar action. Later, in October the DOJ also sued Microsoft for violating a 1994 consent decree, by forcing computer makers to include its Internet browser as a part of the installation of Windows software.

2005: Queen Elizabeth II bestows an honorary knighthood on Gates for his contributions to the United Kingdom. Time names him a “Person of the Year,” along with Melinda Gates and Bono, for what the magazine called his “good Samaritan” work. More.

2007: Gates “graduates” from Harvard; the university awards him with an honorary degree. Gates gives the commencement speech, encouraging the graduates to strive for social change. “Humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries,” Gates says to the class, “but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity.”

He built his first computer program on the General Electric machine. Gates met Paul Allen at the school and they worked together to find bugs in the PDP-10 system belonging to Computer Center Corporation. Gates, Paul and two other students wrote a payroll program for Information Sciences in exchange for computer time and royalties. After that it lead on to his school becoming fully aware of his programming skills, he created a program to schedule students in classes.

   Success story