Bill Gates (full name: William Henry Gates III) is an influential and exceedingly wealthy computer industry pioneer. He heads the multi-billion dollar software behemoth Microsoft, and is currently the world's richest human by some margin. Oracle's Larry Ellison trails by about US$10 billion, even if both of these fortunes are held in stock.

Born October 28, 1955 to Mary and William H. Gates II in Seattle, Washington, he showed himself to be a prodigy in math and science at an early age. Recognizing his intelligence, Gates' parents pulled him from public school and enrolled him in one of the finest private academic institutions in Seattle: Lakeside School. There he met two forces that would change his life: Paul Allen, and the computer. It was at Lakeside that he fostered his love of computing and programming, writing many programs, hacking, and burning through all of Lakeside's shared computer time in less than a week. Gates and his friends (many of whom would be the first programmers at Microsoft) eventually channeled their passion into a computer club, occasionally hired by area firms to fix stability and security problems on their systems.

Gates attained the rank of Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America, spent time as a congressional page, and proved himself a formidable business man in various ventures as well as something of a visionary. After high school he was accepted to, among others, Princeton, Yale, Harvard and MIT. He choose to attend Harvard because that way he could also sit in on classes at MIT. He never finished school, famously dropping out of Harvard in his junior year to found Microsoft with friend Steve Balmer.

Microsoft sold a BASIC compiler to MITS for their Altair 8080, followed with FORTRAN, BASIC, COBOL and Pascal licenses to other microcomputer producers. After these successes, Microsoft inked the celebrated deal which made the company what it is today. Peering ahead, and realizing the 8080 was not powerful enough to last, Gates and Balmer brokered a deal with IBM to produce BASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL, Pascal and DOS for the then-prototype IBM PC. IBM agreed, and even took Microsoft's advice to use the new Intel 8086 chip in the machine. They watched the IBM PC explode and become an industry standard, taking their software with it.

If anything, Gates has a knack for being in the right place at the right time. He is a visionary who understands technology and what people want out of it. Thus, it was in early 1985 that Windows 1.0 shipped, and --although it wasn't a commercial success until the early 1990s when Windows 3.0 shipped-- Microsoft was already among the most influential forces of the technological revolution. It got there through the good fortune, cunning, and brashness of Bill Gates. Say what you will of him, he succeeded with strategy and tactics in the battlefield of advanced technology, maneuvering to be in the right place at the right time. He became a billionaire 60 times over because he saw what the world needed, and gave it to them. Those products may not have been the first or the best, but they were put together in a way that worked. Bill Gates is a marketer.