By Apostle Dr. Raphael O. Ayemere

William Henry “Bill” Gates 111 (born October 28, 1955) is an American Business Magnate investor, programmer, inventor and philanthropist. Gates is the former chief executive and current chairman of Microsoft, the world’s largest personal—computer software company, which he co-founded with Paul Allen.
He is consistently ranked in the Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest people, and was the wealthiest overall from 1995  to 2009 excluding 2008, when he was ranked third; in 2011 he was the wealthiest American and the world’s second wealthiest person. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires List, Gates is the world’s richest person in 2013, a position that he last held on the list in 2007.
During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of CEO and Chief software architect, and  remains the largest individual shareholder, with 6.4 percent  of the common stock. He has also authored and co-authored several books
Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. Gates has been criticized for his business tactics, which have been considered anticompetitive, an opinion which has in some cases been upheld by the courts.  In the later stages of his career, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavours, donating large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000.
Gates stepped down as chief executive officer of Microsoft in January 2000. He remained as chairman and created the position of chief software architect. In June 2006, Gates announced that he would be transiting from full-time work at Microsoft to part-time work, and full –time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He gradually transferred his duties to Ray Ozzie,  chief software architect, and .Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer. Gates’s last full- time day at Microsoft was June 27, 2008. He remains at Microsoft as non-executive chairman.

Early life
Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, to William H. Gates Sr and Mary Maxwell Gates. His ancestry includes English, German, and Scots-Irish. His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way. Gates’s maternal grandfather was JW Maxwell, a national bank president. Gates has one elder sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and one younger sister, Libby. He was the fourth of his name in his family, but was known as William Gates l11 or “Trey” because his father had the “11” suffix. Early on in his life, Gates’s parents had a law career in mind for him. When Gates was young, his family regularly attended a Congregational church.
At 13 he enrolled in the Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school. When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School’s rummage sale to buy a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the school’s students. Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users, to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly. When he reflected back on that moment, he said, “There was just something neat about the machine.” After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, he and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these Systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland and Kent Evans for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.
At  the end of the ban, the four students offered to find bugs CCC’s software in exchange for computer time. Rather than use the system via Teletype Gates went to CCC’s offices and studied source code for various programs that rail on the 5 including programs in Fortran, Lisp and machine language. The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970, when the company went out of business. The following year, information Sciences Inc. hired the four Lakeside students to write a payroll program in Cobol, providing them computer tune and royalties. After his administrators became aware of his programming abilities, Gates wrote the school’s computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students. He later stated that “it was hard to tear myself away from a machine at which I could so unambiguously demonstrate success.” At age 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor. In early 1973, Bill Gates served as a congressional page in the US House of Representatives.
Gates graduated from Lakeside School in 1973. He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT and enrolled at Harvard College in the autumn of 1973. While at Harvard, he met Steve
Ballmer, who later succeeded Gates as CEO of Microsoft.
The Poker Room in Currier House at Harvard University where Gates and Allen formed Microsoft
In his sophomore year, Gates devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems presented in a combinatorics class by Harry Lewis, one of his professors. Gates’s solution held the record as the fastest version for over thirty years; its successor is faster by only one percent. His solution was later formalized in a published paper in collaboration with Harvard computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou.
Gates did not have a definite study plan while a student at Harvard and spent a lot of time using the school’s computers. Gates remained in