Bill Gates discovered the fascination of computers as a 12-year-old at the private Lakeside School in Seattle, Washington. Four years later, Gates and schoolmate Paul Allen wrote software to measure Seattle's traffic flow, and incorporated their first company, Traf-O-Data.

With two others, they formed the Lakeside Programming Group and wrote complex payroll applications for a local company. When Lakeside School bought a computer, Gates and company got the job of scheduling their own classes.

Gates went to Harvard and Allen accepted a job in Boston. There the two wrote and marketed BASIC for the Altair, the first home computer kit. When Gates dropped out of Harvard to found and run Microsoft, first in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and then in Seattle, he was on his way to becoming one of the world's richest private citizens.