Bill H. Gates, born on Oct. 28, 1955, grew up in Seattle with his two sisters while their father was an attorney and their late mother a schoolteacher and chairwoman of United Way International. At age 13, he developed an interest in software and began programming computers. Bill has been involved in this industry since he was in school; he made money-selling software that he made to his school and city. His first company was called Traf-O-Data; they sold a program that could count traffic in a city. That was about all he did in Traf-O-Data. In 1973, Gates entered Harvard University as a freshman where he would develop a version of the programming language BASIC for the first microcomputer - the MITS Altair. After staying to only his junior year Bill left Harvard to devote his hours to Microsoft, a company he had begun in 1975 with his childhood friend Paul Allen. With Bill in charge, Microsoft's priorities have been to continually advance and improve software technology, and to make it easier, more cost-effective and more enjoyable for people to use computers. Now Microsoft has grown to be the largest software company there is and they show no sign of slowing down. It has been calculated that Microsoft controls 80-85% of the entire PC software industry. The company has hundreds of products and nearly 18,000 employees making it one of the largest companies to date. Many of the companies' shareholders are now millionaires and a few including Bill Gates and Paul Allen are billionaires.
             Now as of October 2001, Bill gates is the richest man in the world, with a net worth of $28.38 Billion dollars. According to "Yahoo! Inside Trades Site," Bill has 622,321,300 shares of Microsoft selling at $45.6 dollars each, which is 12.49% of all the shares. Since March 13, 1986 Bill has been making $3,231.27 every minute, $32.57 Million each week, and $1.7 Billion a year. Say you layed an endless line of $1 bills laid end to end. If...