Gates first exposure to computers came while he was attending the prestigious Lakeside School in Seattle. A local company offered the use of its computer to the school through a Teletype link, and young Gates became entranced by the possibilities of the primitive machine.

Along with fellow student Paul Allen, he began not going to his class to work in the school’s computer room. Their work would soon pay off. When Gates was 15, he and Allen went into business together. The two teens netted $20,000 with a program they developed to measure traffic flow in the Seattle area.

Much as Gates had anticipated, after the first IBM PCs were released, such as Compaq began producing compatible PCs, and the market was soon flooded with clones. Like IBM, rather than produce their own operating systems, decided it was cheaper to purchase MS-DOS off the shelf. As a result, MS-DOS became the standard operating system for the industry, and Microsoft’s sales went from $7 million in 1980 to $16 million in 1981.

info courtesy of google

courtesy of google