William Gates, the son of a prominent Seattle, Washington lawyer, was an underachieving math whiz in school. He was first exposed to digital computers while in the seventh grade and worked on various computer projects for the next several years. While in high school, Gates and a friend, Paul Allen, formed a company called Traf-Data, which used the Intel 8008 microprocessor to help control traffic patterns in Seattle. Gates eventually sold this system to the city for $20,000 when he was only fifteen years old. He dropped out of high school for one year to work for TRW in computing, earning $30,000. In 1974 Gates was attending Harvard University when Allen spotted an advertisement for a $350 assemble-at-home computer called the Altair 8800, manufactured by MITS, a company headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Gates and Allen worked nonstop for six weeks to devise a simple version of BASIC, a programming language, for the Altair...