Bill Gates at 60: his ten defining moments

On 28 October 2015, Microsoft founder Bill Gates turned 60. During his life he's been many things: a precocious student, an aggressive founder of a huge company, a super-smart coder and now a philanthropist aiming to rid the world of malaria.

What's been consistent in everything Gates has done, though, is his drive and will to succeed. As a businessperson, Gates looks to the outside world as if he knows no fear, taking on competitors, the US Department of Justice and now a disease.

There have been many moments in Gates' life that have shaped not only his future, but also that of the computer industry. No single person – not even Steve Jobs – has made a bigger impact on computing. Arguably, Gates' work has affected more people than any other person in the 20th century.

We've picked out the ten moments we think encapsulate Bill Gates, both good and bad, and his impact on the world.

1975: Gates starts Microsoft

Although they didn't register the trademark until the following year, by the age of 20 Gates and school friend Paul Allen were already running Microsoft – or rather “Micro-Soft”, as they were calling it at the time.

The two, who had been friends since school, had been obsessed with computers at a time when they were the size of cars and you worked with them remotely via teletype.

Fortunately, they went to a school that had the funds to install a teletype for computer access – a rarity in the 1960s – although pupils had to pay for computer time over and above their “free” allocation. Allen was so obsessed that, as Gates revealed in a 1995 interview with Time magazine, he wasn't allowed to graduate until his parents had paid off the $200 bill for extra computer time.

Gates and Allen had already started another company before Microsoft, called Traf-O-Data, but it was the opportunity to create a version of BASIC for the Altair 8800 from Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), which the magazine Popular Electronics described as the “world's first minicomputer kit to rival commercial models”, that really spurred their business careers. To sell the product, they needed a company – and Microsoft, without the hyphen, was born.

1976: Gates sends “the Open Letter to Hobbyists”

Altair BASIC did well, but not well enough for the budding entrepreneurs. At a seminar for the legendary Homebrew Computer Club, a paper tape with the code for Altair BASIC on it disappeared – and at the next meeting, 50 copies of the tape were freely handed out.

This was entirely in accordance with the culture of computing at the time. Code was something you shared, not sold – but Microsoft was receiving a royalty on every copy of BASIC shipped by MITS. And, although MITS was selling hundreds of Altairs per month, only a few tens of copies of BASIC were going along with them.

Appalled by what he saw as the theft of Microsoft code, Gates wrote an open letter to the hobbyist community, which appeared in the Homebrew Computer Club newsletter. He pointed out that “most directly, the thing you do is theft” – setting the tone for the battle between commercial software and piracy that goes on today.

1977: Gates gets arrested, and the infamous “mugshot” is born

If Gates was determined to ensure that computer hobbyists obeyed the law, he was less interested in obeying it himself. Twice, in 1975 and 1977, he was arrested for speeding, although some reports embellish this by adding in driving without a licence and running a stop sign.

The second arrest generated one of the most famous images of Gates. Sporting a floral shirt, curious “casual” sweater and a pair of glasses that could only come from the 1970s, the 21-year-old Gates' mugshot makes him look like a teenager, complete with a boyish grin that suggests he really doesn't care about the arrest.

However, the mugshot has had a bigger influence than you might think. Ken Fisher, editor-in-chief of Ars Technica, noticed that the default image silhouette used in Outlook 2010 bore a remarkable resemblance to the mugshot. We have no way of verifying this, but the similarities are certainly there to see.

1977: Gates officially leaves Harvard

Harvard's student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, once named Bill Gates the university's “most successful dropout”, and it's hard to disagree. Gates' record at Harvard was, to say the least, patchy: initially enrolling in 1973, he attended for a few semesters here and there before formally dropping out in 1977, just two semesters short of graduating. He got an honorary degree from the university in 2007, when he told the audience for his speech that “I've been waiting more than 30 years to say this: Dad, I always told you I'd come back and get my degree.”

However, Harvard had one important impact on Gates' life: it was where he first met Steve Ballmer, who was to join Microsoft in 1980 and rise to being both Gates' best friend and CEO.

1981: Gates, Kildall and MS-DOS

One of the biggest characteristics of Gates' career is his ability to make the most of even the tiniest opportunity, and nothing illustrates this like the deal he made with “Big Blue” to use MS-DOS on the new IBM PC.

The opportunity came when Gary Kildall, founder of Digital Research which owned the then-dominant CP/M operating system, failed to make a deal quickly enough with IBM (the oft-repeated story that Kildall was out flying his personal plane when IBM came calling and refused to land is, sadly, untrue).

Instead, the deal came about when Jack Sams, the lead negotiator at IBM, asked Gates to help find an alternative. Gates, spotting his chance, swiftly made a deal with Seattle Computer Products to license 86-DOS to Microsoft, who in turn reworked it, named it PC-DOS and licensed it to IBM.

1983: Gates steals the TV from “their rich neighbour Xerox”

Microsoft started to compete with “Apple Computer” in the early 1980s. Prior to the release of the IBM PC, Apple was one of the largest and most important PC makers in the world, but, by 1983, it had a strange relationship with Microsoft. It wanted to keep Microsoft onside, to get it to develop applications for the upcoming Macintosh, but was also worried that Microsoft would copy the graphical user interface (GUI) for its PC-DOS.

However, Microsoft did the inevitable and announced the first version of Windows. Steve Jobs was furious, saying “get Gates down here immediately!” Gates calmly replied: “I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbour named Xerox and I ??broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.” Apple had (legally) “borrowed” the GUI concepts from Xerox. In the end, the Windows GUI wasn't very Mac-like, but that didn't stop Apple suing.

1997: Gates lends Apple US$150 million

If relations between Apple and Microsoft had started declining in the 1980s, by the mid-90s they were in need of counselling. When Steve Jobs became interim CEO following the departure of Gil Amelio, the company was close to bankruptcy. It needed two things: money, and confidence that Apple had a future.

Jobs called his old sparring partner Gates, and put a potential deal to him: Microsoft would invest in Apple, receiving non-voting stock. In return, the two companies would settle some long-running legal disputes. Gates accepted.

What followed was remarkable. At the summer's Macworld Expo in Boston, Gates appeared on a giant screen to announce the deal. It was a metaphor for where the two companies now found themselves: Microsoft, the giant of the industry; Apple begging scraps. The crowd booed – Jobs told them to “forget the idea that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose”.

1998: Gates appears before the antitrust trial

The Microsoft antitrust cases brought by the US Department of Justice and the European Commission have probably done more to shape the recent history of the company than anything else. Had Microsoft not had its wings clipped by the DoJ, it could have brought more of its muscle to bear on the mobile market, and made it harder for Android and iOS to gain a foothold.

A turning point in the DoJ case was Gates' appearance before the court to give his deposition. Rather than appearing in person, he gave his testimony via a video link from a Microsoft boardroom. Reports at the time described his testimony as “evasive and unresponsive”, with Gates doing his best to pick holes in questions and effectively refuse to answer them.

2000: Gates appoints Ballmer his successor

Steve Ballmer had been at Microsoft for 20 years by the time Bill Gates decided to stand down as CEO of the company. He had long been seen as the “prince in waiting”, the obvious successor to Gates. It was only really a question of when Gates thought the time was right to step aside.

That moment came in 2000, and it's fair to say that it proved to be one of the less successful decisions in Gates' career. The early years of Ballmer's leadership saw Microsoft at its peak and making more money than it knew what to do with, but it lacked the ability to anticipate the products that would supersede Windows, continuing to bank just on Office and Windows.

2000: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched

For anyone who followed Microsoft and Gates in the 80s and 90s, the biggest surprise in his career is probably endowing most of his money to a charitable foundation. That he also created the foundation with the aim of improving global healthcare, reducing poverty and expanding educational opportunities might have been even more of a shock.

It's a cliche´ to suggest that Gates' marriage to Melinda French in 1994 brought about a change in his personality. In fact, what probably changed him more was having three children. Coupled to Gates' ferocious intelligence and curiosity about the wider world, it's easy to see how a wider challenge of changing the world might be something he wanted to do.

The Gates Foundation has the largest endowment in the world, with over $42 billion in funds, and has already seen results. With the help of a vaccination drive, deaths from measles in Africa have fallen by 90%, and the foundation spends more money trying to cure the diseases affecting the world's poorest people than any other organisation. Gates has saved countless lives, and for that we can even forgive him for Windows ME.

Lead image: Frederic Legrand - COMEO / Shutterstock.com