In 1975, Bill Gates and his partner Paul Allen founded the world's largest software company, Microsoft. Gates wrote his first software program at the age of thirteen. While in high school he helped train a group of programmers who computerized their school's payroll system and founded Traf-O-Data, a company that sold traffic counting systems to local governments. In 1973 he became a student at Harvard University, where he also met Steve Ballmer, who is now the CEO of Microsoft. They began by adapting BASIC, a popular programming language used on large computers, for use on microcomputers. With the success of this project, Gates dropped out of Harvard in his senior year and, with Allen, founded Microsoft. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay One of the first projects Gates and Allen began was to create a computer operating system known as MS-DOS for International Business Machines Corporation, then the world's largest computer supplier and an industry pacesetter, for use on the his first microcomputer, IBM. IBM quickly established the technical standard for the PC industry, and MS-DOS similarly eliminated competition for operating systems. By the early 1990s he had become the most prominent face of the PC industry. Gates amassed a huge paper fortune as the company's largest individual shareholder. He quickly became a paper billionaire in 1986, and within a decade his net worth reached tens of billions of dollars. At age 31, Gates becomes the youngest billionaire ever. He meets his future wife, Melinda French, at a Microsoft event in New York. In 1990, the Federal Trade Commission began an investigation into possible collusion between IBM and Microsoft. The FTC accuses IBM and Microsoft of working together to carve up the operating system market in an anticompetitive manner, with IBM's OS/2 capturing the high-end operating system market. the market and Microsoft's Windows which covers the low end of the market. In July, at the age of 39 and with a fortune of $12.9 billion, Gates becomes the richest man in the world. Later that summer, Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer to the world, as part of Windows 95. The Road Ahead, Gates' book about his vision for the digital future, holds the number one spot on the New York Times best-seller list for seven weeks. Gates begins to shift Microsoft's focus toward the emerging Internet. In 1995, computers were still primarily intended for office and productivity. But Windows 95 brought with it a word that consumers understood: “Boot.” Start what? Start anything. There was also extensive built-in support for multimedia content, which helped foster an explosion of CD-ROM titles. The release was a huge success. Microsoft sold seven million copies in the first five weeks of launch, and Windows 95 quickly became the number one operating system on the market. As exciting and innovative as it is, nothing will eclipse Bill Gates' dance at the press conference - not even Microsoft's introduction of the now-iconic Start button, the taskbar and support for filenames of up to 250 characters (hard to be believed now, but the release of these new features was a big deal at the time). Bill Gates became the richest man on the planet at the age of 39. He remained at number one on the Forbes list of the richest people in the world until 2007. Keep in mind: this is just one example. Get a customized document from our expert writers now. Get a custom essay.