#6 William “Bill” Gates

Age: 54yrs

Birth Place: Seattle, Washington, USA

Industry: Information Technology, Computer Science

Influence: Changed the Personal Computer Forever

Net Worth: $53 billion

Why they made the list…

Bill Gates; The second richest man on the planet, one of the most recognized names in the world, as much a celebrity as the pop stars and movie stars due to his highly public profile. Bill has always been in the lime-light since he began his career way back aged 13yrs the age of the personal computer was far from near and Bill, Paul Allen and some others from high-school started using the computers of the time, the DEC PDP-10 was one of them. Bill, Allen and their friends studied the inner workings and making notes of coding language and tried to decipher it to understand how a computer worked. They were eventually banned from the DEC PDP-10 after they were caught exploiting code “bugs” which allowed them to extend the amount of time they had been allocated on the machine. In 1973 after completing high-school with a 1600 (top score) in his SAT’s, he enrolled at the University of Harvard. While studying at Harvard Bill made a new friend in Steve Ballmer, they have continued to be friends to this day and Ballmer took over as CEO of Microsoft upon Gate’s early retirement. After spending much of his study time at the helm of the University’s computer systems Bill decided to leave Harvard in order to start his own business, this was partly due to the launch of the Altair 8800 which used Intel’s new cpu 8080 which had gotten bill excited by the prospects of what he could do with the technology.

Many people call Bill Gates a college drop-out, or that he failed college, this simply is not true at all; it was a decision he made himself, he did not fail or give in he saw an opportunity the same as many entrepreneurs and he took a huge leap of faith that eventually paid off. Having gained interest from MIT’s director Bill and Allen, created an emulator that ran on a microcomputer to simulate a computer they had no access to (but had said they had) to show to Ed Roberts (MIT). They received a deal from MIT and began working on their new business in 1975 with the company name “Micro-Soft” although in 1976 they changed it to Microsoft, dropping the hyphen. Throughout the years Bill and Allen made some amazing advancements in computer technology and partnered with some massive businesses in order to gain the capital they needed to start the manufacturing of their own products and software. IBM approached Microsoft in 1980 asking for them to develop code for their BASIC (computer language) computer the IBM PC, MS DOS was created and this made Microsoft a very big player in the industry over night. In 1985 a decade after beginning their business They launched the first ever copy of MS Windows. As we know Microsoft became the standard in computer technology and has now become the largest computer information and technology business in the world. Microsoft currently stands at $62.4 billion (2010) with Bill Gates have a personal fortune of around $53 million which he uses to help very worthy causes and charities; including his own, the Gates Foundation.