The American businessman, philanthropist, and chairman of Microsoft was born on October 28, 1955, into a prosperous family in Seattle. His mother served on a bank board and his father was a well-known attorney. According to legend, his father established a $1 million fund for him at the time of his birth. Gates, however, disputed it. But one thing is for certain—he had the best education possible, including three years at Harvard.

In primary school, Gates did exceptionally well in the sciences and math. He began attending Seattle’s most prestigious preparatory school, the Lakeside School, when he was 13 years old

When he was in the eighth grade, Lakeside’s school mothers purchased an ASR-33 teletype terminal and a block of computer time using money from the school’s rummage sale. In order to pursue his interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, Gates was granted a leave of absence from his math classes.

He and other students sought time on other systems, notably the DEC PDP minicomputer, once the Mothers’ Club grant ran out. One of these machines was a PDP-10 owned by Computer Centre Corporation, which barred the Lakeside students from using computers all summer after discovering their exploiting of operating system flaws..