Born into a family immersed in business and politics, William "Bill" Gates  inherited quite a knack for running a business and managing people, which would ultimately lead him to a billion-dollar success. From an early point in his education, he was competitive, driven, and was striving to be on top. 

This would prove to be the crucial ingredient in his ride to fame, success, and unimaginable wealth.

It was during his stay at Lakeside, a private school, that he first laid his hands on the tool that was to propel him to fame: the computer. Little did he know that computers would later on make his name known the world over.

Despite his attempt at education as a pre-law student at Harvard University, Bill Gates' fate was far too entwined with computers. He enrolled only to later on drop out, with the tempting challenge of rocking the computing world.

It was also there that he met Paul Allen, one of the first Microsoft programmers, who ventured into the computer business with him. Early on Bill Gates and Paul Allen studied and learned everything they could about those early computers and knew  that they could take  the world of computing to a different level.

As if destiny was playing a part in it all, Paul Allen came across a magazine that featured the Altair 8080, headlined as the World's First Microcomputer Kit. It was a golden opportunity that presented itself at just the right time, and having been born competitive and aggressive, Bill Gates immediately called MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), the Albuquerque - New Mexico company who manufactured the Altair and convinced them that they were working on a BASIC program that would work for their Altair computer - even though they did not yet have the software written!

It took them eight weeks, dividing the workload, to come up with a program.

Testing the program for the first time on the first Altair they had ever set eyes on, they were faced with a one-in-a-million chance, and they successfully closed a deal. At this point, Bill knew it was time and he dropped out of Harvard. Not long after that, Microsoft was born. This was in 1975.

1980 was the year that would finally bring the Microsoft name to the masses. IBM was on their way to creating their new personal computer and needed an Operating System for it. They had approached a leading It company at the time called Digital Research but could not get a contract that both parties could agree on.

By this time they had heard of Bill Gates and so met up with Microsoft to discuss the creation of an Operating System for their new PC.

For this contract, Microsoft negotiated a license for a "clone" of the dominant operating system at the time: CP/M (the clone was called 86-DOS because it was designed to run on the Intel 8086 processor) from a company called Seattle Computer Products. It cost $25,000 and they then re-licensed it to IBM.

IBM later renamed it to PC-DOS.

Microsoft then acquired all rights to 86-DOS Operating System for only $50,000 from Seattle Computer Products in July, 1981, shortly before IBM released the PC. he then went on to create his own Operating System from the 86-DOS Operating System and called it MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System)

Bill Gates managed to convince IBM to let him retain the rights to MS-DOS and to sell it separately from the IBM personal computers with its PC-DOS. It was this wise business move that made him a computer tycoon up until now, earning huge amounts of money from the licensing of the MS-DOS. 

Because of its history, MS-DOS was the key to the growth of Microsoft. License earnings funded the company's further efforts. They released later versions of the system, and were intent on upgrading and improving it for a while. The interest, however, in graphical user interface or GUI, prompted them to create an add-on to MS-DOS in 1985 called "Windows".

This marked the birth of the Windows operating system. Initially designed to run on top of MS-DOS, it allowed more user options such as multitasking, installation of devices, and to run applications for longer periods of time.

Finally, Windows became a world wide Operating System, and gave birth to a continuous stream of improvements and updates that finally brought to life the operating systems most of the world uses today.

After the release of Windows NT in 1993 version, there soon followed the "home user" version called Windows 95.

Then came Windows 2000, Windows 98, Windows ME or Millennium Edition.

More recently, Whistler, or more popularly known as Windows XP became a huge hit, and Microsoft progressed on with Windows Vista.

Work has now begun on the replacement for Vista...