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.
Robert Franklin Gates commissions between 1937 and 1942, Gates also served as an instructor at the University of Florida, Hood College in Frederick, MD, the Washington County Museum of Art in Hagerstown, MD, and the Phillips Gallery Art School in Washington, D.C., where his wife Margaret worked as a secretary. Gates served in World War II as a civilian technician with the U.S. Navy. He made models and designed camouflage patterns. After the war, he studied under Bill Calfee at American University. He joined the faculty there in 1946. Gates worked as the Artist-in-Residence at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq from 1966-1967.