Bill Gates' 71st Birthday Countdown

Bill Gates Timeline

About Bill Gates

Gates co-founded Microsoft at 19 and helped put a computer on every desk; in his second act, the Gates Foundation became one of the largest private philanthropies in history, focused on global health and education.

The demo that had to work the first time

In January 1975 Gates was a Harvard sophomore when he and Paul Allen saw the Altair 8800 on the cover of Popular Electronics. They called its maker, MITS, and claimed they had a BASIC interpreter ready to show. They did not — so they wrote one in about eight weeks on a campus mainframe, simulating a chip they had never touched. When Allen typed PRINT 2+2 at the demo in Albuquerque, the machine printed 4. Microsoft was founded that spring.

A computer on every desk

Microsoft's founding dream — a computer on every desk and in every home — sounded absurd in 1975, when computers filled rooms. Gates drove the company from a two-man shop in Albuquerque to the world's dominant software maker: its 1986 stock offering made him a billionaire at 31, at the time the youngest self-made billionaire ever, and Windows came to run roughly nine out of ten of the world's personal computers. He handed over the CEO job in 2000 to focus on giving the money away.

Giving it all away, on a deadline

The Gates Foundation gave away more than $100 billion in its first 25 years, much of it to global health: its $750 million pledge helped launch Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which has since helped vaccinate over a billion children. In May 2025, on the foundation's 25th anniversary, Gates announced it will spend roughly $200 billion more — virtually his entire fortune — and close its doors for good in 2045.

Quick facts

• Born October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington
• Co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975
• Left Harvard to build Microsoft
• Wrote Microsoft's first product, Altair BASIC, in about eight weeks
• The Gates Foundation gave away over $100 billion in its first 25 years
• Plans to give away virtually all his wealth and close the foundation by 2045

Books by Bill Gates

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