What comes to your mind first when you think of Microsoft? Windows, Kinect or Skype? Its none of these for me. Its Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and a perfect living example. This person earns around $250 every second of his life yet he sleeps with the poor to sympathise with them in their mud-thatched huts whose roof can fall anytime. He wears a dhoti when in Indian villages, eats the local food with local people, laughs with them and yet was the richest man in the world for 13 years in a row. Having dedicated his entire fortune of billions of dollars to charity through the Bill and Melinda Gates Charitable Foundation, lets find some interesting facts about this unique personality.
1. Out of a total of 1600 marks in the SAT exam, Bill Gates scored 1590.
2. At the age of 17, Bill Gates sold his first computer program, a time-tabling system for his high school for $4,200.
3. “I shall be a millionaire by 30” is what Gates said to his university teachers. At 31, he became a billionaire.
4. Microsoft’s first product, the Altair BASIC was co-written by Bill Gates While at Harvard.
5. Founder of Microsoft meets his to-be wife, a company worker at a Microsoft press event in 1987 in Manhattan and later get married on New Years Day in 1994. This is how Bill and Melinda Gates met.
6. Carnegie Mellon University honors Bill Gates by naming a building after him, the Gates Building of Computer Science.
7. Bill Gates earns $250 every second; that’s about $20 million a day and $7.8 billion a year.
8. From the early team that made up Microsoft in 1978, Only Bill Gates stuck around with all others having left Microsoft sooner or later (although Paul Allen is still a senior strategy advisor).
Bob O’Rear, Microsoft’s Chief mathematician, left Microsoft in 1993 and went on to be a cattle rancher.
Bob Greenberg, a programmer, left Microsoft in 1981 and went on to help develop Cabbage Patch dolls!
Marla Wood, a bookkeeper, left Microsoft in 1980 and later sued them for sex discrimination. She now describes herself as a ‘professional volunteer’.
Jim Lane, a Project Manager, left Microsoft in 1985 and eventually started his own software company.
Know any other interesting tidbits? Dos share!
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