Microsoft company's shares reach its highest value since December 1999. In 2018, Microsoft surpassed Apple as the most valuable publicly traded company in the world after being dethroned by the tech giant in 2010. Childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen sought to make a business utilizing their shared skills in computer programming. In 1972 they founded their first company, named Traf-O-Data, which sold a rudimentary computer to track and analyze automobile traffic data. While Gates enrolled at Harvard, Allen pursued a degree in computer science at Washington State University, though he later dropped out of school to work at Honeywell.
Bill Gates (frontiersman) Bill Gates (frontiersman) "Swiftwater" Bill Gates (died 1935) was an American frontiersman and fortune hunter, and a fixture in stories of the Klondike Gold Rush. He made and lost several fortunes, and died in Peru in 1935 pursuing a silver strike. In one famous Klondike story he presented Dawson dance hall girl Gussie Lamore her weight in gold. Gates was married briefly to Grace Lamore in 1898; he later married Bera Beebe, with whom he fathered two sons, Fredrick and Clifford. Gates subsequently abandoned her for 15-year-old Kitty Brandon, his niece. His biography "The True Life Story of Swiftwater Bill