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.
University Scholars Program major in computer science and economics in 1986 and an MBA from Duke's Fuqua School of Business in 1987. The University Scholars Program at Duke was the first major philanthropic endeavor by the Gates' through the William H. Gates Foundation, prior to the establishment of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The University Scholars Program is the first scholarship program of its kind in the United States. The program offers scholarship support to undergraduate, graduate and professional school students with a focus on interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge. The focus on interdisciplinarity derives in part from Melinda French Gates' own interdisciplinary