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 Sr. Bill Gates Sr. William Henry Gates II (born November 30, 1925), better known as Bill Gates Sr., is an American retired attorney and philanthropist and author of the book "Showing Up for Life: Thoughts on the Gifts of a Lifetime". He is the father of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. One of a line of businessmen named William H. Gates, and sometimes called William Gates Jr. in his career, he is now generally known as William Henry Gates Sr. due to the greater prominence of his son William H. Gates III (Bill Gates). Gates was born in 1925 in Bremerton, Washington,