Bill Gates's supreme accomplishment has been to design and develop innovative software for the personal computer. Gate's software helped make PCs the universally popular machines they are today. Communicating with computers is a matter of "translating" a person's native language into the codes that a computer understands. The easier this translation is to make, the easier it is to work with the computer and the more accessible and widely used the computer becomes. Gate's gift for software design, as well as his skills in business, made Microsoft--the company he started up with a high school friend in Redmond, Washington--a multibillion-dollar empire. Gates is the chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft.

William Henry Gates III was born October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington. He was the second child and only son of William Henry Gates Jr., a prominent Seattle attorney, and Mary Maxwell, a former school teacher. Although Gates's parents...