Microsoft was formed by a Harvard College Dropout called Bill Gates. Bill Gates was born William Henry Gates III on October 28, 1955. He was born to a family which was successful in business and they were living a comfortable upper middle class life in Seattle, Washington.

At that time, computers were still too large and expensive for schools to purchase one of its own. After few months, schools finally allowed the students to use their computers. Bill Gates, his buddy Paul Allen quickly took to computing. In fact, they began to skip classes, and stay in the computer room and write programs, read computer books and find out exactly how these machines worked. They soon learned to hack the system, and altered and crashed valuable files until they were banned from the computer. Luckily Bill and his friends were soon hired by the computer company to find bugs and explore weaknesses in the system. The boys had wanted something else than money, they wanted unlimited computer time.

Unfortunately, the computer company that was hiring the two boys went out of business in 1970, and they had to find alternate sources for computer time. They were soon hired by Information Sciences Inc. to write a program for payroll. This time they actually earned money as well as enjoying the unlimited computer time. It was during this time that the group gained more skills in computer programming. They were hired or contracted by various organizations to find bugs and fix them. Each job helped Gates and Allen to learn their skill and delve even deeper into the world of programming

One year later, Paul Allen saw the first microcomputer on the cover of a magazine. Altair 8800 under the headline "World's First Microcomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models" was the Altair 8080. They then realized the time was right. The home PC business was about to explode and someone would need to provide software for the machines. By stretching the truth somewhat, Gates arranged for a meeting with the Altair manufacturers. He had called them to let them know he had a program written for them. After the appointment was made, Gates and Allen stayed up for nights, rushing to write the program he had promised. It worked perfectly at the meeting, and everyone was impressed. They sold the program, and saw that this was something they could do for real. Within a year, Gates had dropped out of Harvard and Microsoft was formed.

The company went through some rough first years, but eventually was able to license MS-DOS to IBM. The IBM PC took the public by storm, and its success signaled the success of Microsoft. Bill and Paul continued writing software, for businesses as well as the consumer market. In 1986, the company became public, and Gates became a 31-year old billionaire. The next year, the first version of Windows was introduced, and by 1993 a million copies per month were being sold.

Today, nearly all families across the world uses a computer and most were Microsoft based systems.

All the hard work from Bill Gates and Paul Allan had made a dramatic effect on the people worldwide.

By Peter Chen