Skinny, shy and awkward, teenaged Bill Gates seemed an unlikely successor to his overachieving parents. His father, powerfully built and 6'6'' tall, was a prominent Seattle attorney, and his gregarious mother served on charitable boards and ran the United Way. While he showed enormous talent for math and logic, young Bill, a middle child, was no one's idea of a natural leader, let alone a future billionaire who would reinvent American business.
Born in 1955, Gates attended public elementary school, and enrolled in the private Lakeside School at age 12. The following year, Gates wrote his first computer program, at a time when computers were still room-sized machines run by scientists in white coats. Soon afterwards, he and his friend Paul Allen wrote a scheduling program for the school—which coincidentally placed the two in the same classes as the prettiest girls in school. Still in high school, Gates and Allen founded a company called Traf-O-Data, which analyzed city traffic......
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