Bill Gates

Gates in 1977

William Henry "Bill" Gates III, born on October 28, 1955, founder of Microsoft¹, is arguably one of the most famous people of the period. He began working with computers at an early age, and, while attending Lakeside School with the friend Paul Allen he was already employed by the Computer Center Corporation. He later enrolled into Harvard College, in 1973.

The BASIC interpreter

In 1975, during Gates' time at Harvard, he and Allen read of a new computer, the MITS Altair 8800, and decided to contact the computer's manufacturers, in order to sell them an interpreter for the BASIC programming language (interpreter that, at the time, they had not yet written). MITS agreed to buy the interpreter, and the two managed to write the interpreter in time for the demo (in just a few weeks, a considerable feat).
The interpreter became quite popular and its success allowed Gates and Allen to found a company, called Micro-Soft (the hyphen would be dropped a year later), though the widespread sharing of a prerelease copy prompted Gates to publish an Open Letter to Hobbyists, in the MITS newsletter, expressing dismay at widespread copyright infringement of software, claiming that it would discourage developers from producing high quality software.

The IBM deal and the rise of Microsoft

In 1981 Microsoft licensed an operating system to IBM, for their upcoming personal computer, in truth they once again did not have the software they were selling, but they did manage to buy an operating system, 86-DOS, from Seattle Computer Products and deliver it to IBM in time.

Licensing the operating system to IBM rather than selling it proved instrumental to Gates' fortune and the dominance of Microsoft, as, shortly after the release of IBM's PC, clones of the PC flooded the market and Microsoft was free to license the OS, now MS-DOS, to them too.
In the following years the partnership with IBM continued, but, in parallel, Gates and Microsoft kept developing their own competing software (which would run on competing, cheaper computers), bringing to the release of the Windows operating system and popular software like Microsoft Office. The partnership would finally end when Microsoft abandoned OS/2, an operating system they were developing for IBM.

By the early nineties Gates' aggressive business practices had made Microsoft one of the most succesful software companies and him one of the richest people in the world.

Personality

Gates is reported to be a particularly competitive man, dedicated to winning. This was reflected by his management style and tendency to try and aggressively conquer the market, and defend it. He actively participated in the development of the company's software for years. Where Steve Jobs would worry about artistic perfection, Gates would simply try and acquire a dominant position in the industry and defend it, which he arguably managed to do.