What you didn’t know about Bill Gates

Bill Gates has been written about more than almost anyone in computing, which means most of the stories in circulation are the same five stories. The better ones sit a bit further down the list: a shared school terminal in Seattle, a booking photo in New Mexico, and a 500 year old notebook that ended up as a Windows screensaver. Here are the Bill Gates facts that usually get left out, and what a few of them say about how cheap, reliable computing eventually reached the rest of us.

Quick answer: Gates co-founded Microsoft at 19, left Harvard without a degree, was booked twice over traffic offences in the 1970s, and has since pledged the bulk of his fortune to the Gates Foundation.

Key takeaways

• Born 28 October 1955 in Seattle; co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975.
• His first real programming happened on a school teletype terminal paid for by a parents’ fundraiser.
• He dropped out of Harvard in 1975 and picked up an honorary degree from the same university in 2007.
• He paid roughly 30 million US dollars for Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester in 1994, then put scans of it on Windows machines as a screensaver.
• He resigned from Microsoft’s board in March 2020 to put his time into the foundation.

It started on a shared terminal, not a laptop

Gates went to Lakeside School in Seattle. The school’s Mothers’ Club raised money at a rummage sale and spent it on computer time, which bought the pupils access to a teletype terminal wired to a mainframe somewhere else in the city. Gates was 13. One of the first things he wrote on it was a noughts and crosses game.

He has been fairly blunt since then that the terminal, not raw talent, was the lucky part. That still holds. A learner with a working machine under R3 000 is in a completely different position to a learner sharing one at school, and the gap has very little to do with specs.

The dropout who came back for the gown

He enrolled at Harvard in 1973, spent more time in the computer lab than in lectures, and left in 1975 to start Microsoft with Paul Allen in Albuquerque. His parents were not thrilled. Thirty two years later Harvard gave him an honorary doctorate, and he opened his commencement speech by telling his father he had finally come back for the degree.

The mugshot

Two traffic stops in New Mexico in the mid 1970s ended with Gates in a police station. The famous one is from December 1977 in Albuquerque, where he was booked after a driving offence and photographed looking thoroughly pleased with himself. That grainy booking photo has outlasted almost every product Microsoft shipped in the same decade.

He owns a da Vinci notebook

In 1994 Gates bought the Codex Leicester, 72 pages of Leonardo da Vinci’s notes on water, rock and astronomy, for around 30 million US dollars at auction. It remains one of the most expensive manuscripts ever sold. He had it digitised, released the images as a screensaver for Windows, and has lent the original to museums ever since rather than keeping it in a vault.

The money is on its way out the door

By 2014, Steve Ballmer had passed Gates as Microsoft’s largest individual shareholder, mostly because Gates kept selling and donating his stake. In 2010 he and Warren Buffett launched the Giving Pledge, asking the very wealthy to commit at least half their money to charity. The Gates Foundation, set up in 2000, is now the largest private foundation in the world and works mainly on disease, poverty and education.

He has also said repeatedly that his three children will inherit a small fraction of it. His line on that thinking, from his 1995 book The Road Ahead: “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”

What any of this has to do with a second hand ThinkPad

Here is the practical bit. The reason a business laptop built in 2019 is still a perfectly good machine in 2026 is that Microsoft spent decades keeping its software running on hardware it did not make. Windows 11 Pro installs and runs properly on eighth generation Intel chips and newer, which covers the HP EliteBook 840, Dell Latitude 7400 and Lenovo ThinkPad T490 that come through our workshop in volume.

That is the whole basis of the ex-corporate market. Big companies replace fleets on a three or four year cycle, the machines get wiped, tested, graded and relicensed, and they turn up as refurbished business laptops at a fraction of what they cost new. The same cycle feeds our refurbished desktop PCs, which tend to last even longer because they run cooler and take upgrades more easily.

Tip: Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 10 in October 2025, so when you buy second hand, check that the machine ships with a genuine Windows 11 Pro licence rather than an unsupported build. Ours do, along with a one year warranty and seven days to return it.

If you are weighing up an older model, check first which second hand machines still clear the Windows 11 hardware bar. Plenty of otherwise decent laptops from 2016 and 2017 do not.

Frequently asked questions

Is Bill Gates still the richest person in the world?

No. He held the top spot for much of the 1990s and 2000s, but he has slid down the rankings as he has moved wealth into the Gates Foundation and others have overtaken him.

Did Bill Gates write Windows himself?

Not personally. His hands-on coding was mostly the early years, starting with the Altair BASIC interpreter he wrote with Paul Allen in 1975. By the time Windows 1.0 shipped in 1985 he was running the company rather than writing the code.

Does he still work at Microsoft?

No. He stood down as CEO in 2000, gave up the chairmanship in 2014, and left the board entirely in March 2020. He stayed on as an informal technology adviser for a period after that.

What was the first program he wrote?

A noughts and crosses game, written on the Lakeside School teletype when he was about 13.

Most of the Gates story is really a story about access: a school that happened to buy computer time, a college town with a computer lab, and then forty years of software built to run on whatever hardware people already owned. That last part is still doing useful work in South Africa, every time a five year old EliteBook gets a fresh licence and a second career in a small office in Pinetown instead of a landfill.