Born on October 28, 1955 to lawyer father and teacher mother in Seattle, Washington, Gates got a taste of computing in his school. Perhaps his first programme was the Tic-Tac-Toe game written in BASIC language on a GE computer.

Interestingly, Gates and three other high school students were banned from computer usage by Seattle-based CCC (Computer Center Corporation) after they were caught exploiting its operating system bugs to steal computer time. The brilliant student that he was, his SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) score in 1973 was a high 1590/1600.

He went to Harvard College, but dropped out to start Microsoft. Later in 2007, he was given an honorary degree by Harvard University. His Harvard classmate Steve Ballmer later became Microsoft CEO.

Inspired by an article in January 1975 issue of 'Popular Electronics' magazine, Gates decided to build a computer, betting on the power of micro-processors (Intel 8080 was around the corner). He saw the magic of software early in the game. An accident landed him a $80,000 IBM business contract, to develop an operating system (PCDOS initially and later MS-DOS).

Its phenomenal success took Microsoft to great heights. Microsoft continued to work with IBM on OS/2 operating system till 1991.

Started as Micro-soft at Albuquerque in New Mexico on November 16, 1976, Microsoft moved to Bellevue in Washington in January 1979, a bold move; most tech companies at that time would locate their operations in Boston area (Route 121) or Bay Area (Silicon Valley). The home town of its founders, Seattle, today is a high-tech hotspot and houses companies like Amazon, Real Networks and Starbucks.

Bill Gates' key creation is Microsoft, a company with sales of $51 billion as of June 2007 with 78,000 employees across 105 countries. Almost 90 per cent of the estimated 1 billion computers (desktop and laptop) in the world are run on Microsoft's Windows and Office. The company has products across the layers network, operating system, database, middleware, application software.

There are technologies that power handheld devices and smartphones, software services, hardware and entertainment devices like Tablet PC, XBox and IPTV technology. The launch of Windows on November 20, 1985, brought Microsoft into the mainstream system of software. Its Windows 95 launch on August 25 saw a marketing blitzkrieg worth $1 billion on the day of the launch.

Gates had the vision to invest in R&D. Microsoft Research created in 1997 (interestingly near Cambridge University in the UK under the guidance of the well-known cryptographer Roger Needham) has an annual budget of $7 billion today. The Indian arm of Microsoft Research started on January 15, 2005 in Bangalore is extremely active.

It is a coincidence that the fading away of the once mighty Bell Lab in the past decade was accompanied by the growth of the Bill Lab.