A journey through Bill Gates's life

Bill Gates in his early days.

At 19 years old, in April 1975, Bill Gates founded Microsoft together with Paul Allen. In just eight months, they earned US$16,000. Three years later, Gates was 23 and his company Microsoft had earned more than US$1 million.

In 1979, four years after its founding, they were already billing US$2,500,000 and were not stopping their expansion: they opened offices in Seattle and had more than 25 employees. To attract more companies, he bought several exclusive software licenses in 1980 for US$50,000, which he adapted to the company’s services. Gates sold this business model to IBM and refused to share the operating system code with it. Therefore, he began selling copies of the software.

However, Microsoft was not the first company Gates founded: at 17, he founded Traf-O-Data in 1972 after the death of a childhood friend.

Gates at the presentation of the legendary Windows 95.

Traf-O-Data was founded by Bill Gates (17), Paul Gilbert and Paul Allen (19). The company’s goal was to analyze and read raw data from road traffic counters to write reports for traffic engineers. The three founders were still students at Lakeside.

They worked with computers with Intel 8008 processors and CP/M as the operating system. They placed pneumatic counters on the sides of roads and rubber hoses that created an air pulse when vehicles ran over them: each air pulse was recorded on a roll of paper tape. That was how the counter worked in the 70s. The time and number of axles punched a paper in 16-bit patterns. This data was then translated for traffic engineers.

The new goal of the three founders was to develop a machine that would read the punched paper tapes automatically: they began writing programs and even recruited employees to manually transcribe the data. And they succeeded: they launched a machine with an Intel 8008 processor and a tape reader.

Traf-O-Data 8008: tape reader, instruction manual, and company business card.

The company closed three years later, in 1975, because the Washington state government decided to do the same job that Traf-O-Data had been doing free of charge. This experience helped them make Microsoft work, a resounding success. Paul Allen says that in this project they not only learned to create software but also hardware and to emulate microprocessors.

The story of young Bill Gates

At 13, he wrote his first single-player tic-tac-toe-style game with a General Electric computer and Teletype Model 33 ASR terminals. This computer was at his school in Seattle. Bill Gates, Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft), Rick Weiland (Microsoft’s second employee), and Kent Evans (who died in an accident) founded a geek programming club they called the “Lakeside Programmers Club.” The idea came from Paul.

Gates, 1977.

At that time, Computer Center Corporation “loaned out computers.” The four of them used to rent computers in order to work and play. One day, the computing center caught them looking for bugs in the computers’ operating system so they could use them longer and for free: the company got angry and banned them from renting computers. Later, they came back with an offer: find errors and vulnerabilities in the company’s software in exchange for using the computers.

Thanks to this agreement, Bill Gates began to delve into programming languages such as Fortran, Lisp, and machine language. Unfortunately, the company closed two years later.

A teacher at the school in Lakeside, Seattle offered Bill Gates and Kent Evans the chance to automate the institute’s organizational system. In return, they obtained benefits to use the school’s computers and royalties on the software.

The entrepreneur's active role during the pandemic

Bill Gates became an active public figure during the pandemic. On multiple occasions, the billionaire spoke about the new normal imposed by the pandemic, when it would end, and his preferred vaccines. According to the philanthropist, things will return to normal when 2022 ends, while in rich countries the pandemic will come to an end in 2021.

During an interview with NBC News, Gates pointed out that humanity will only be able to return to normal life after the pandemic when there is a “super effective” and affordable vaccine. “The only way to return fully to normal is to get a vaccine that is super effective and available to many people,” he said.

The Bill Gates and Melinda Gates Foundation has funds exceeding US$40 billion. His foundation used to be fully dedicated to HIV, malaria, and polio; until the arrival of SARS-CoV-2. “The current global crisis can inform our response to the next one,” Gates reflected. “The innovation pipeline around scaling up diagnostics, new therapies, and vaccines is truly impressive.”