Gates at Lakeside's clunky Teletype terminal, where he wrote his first programs in eigth grade COURTESY LAKESIDE SCHOOL	Tic-Tac-Dough Gates and his pal Paul Allen produced two programs in the 8th grade: one played tic-tac-toe. Before long, they were moonlighting as adolescent computer consultants for a local corporation. In high school, Gates and his friends devised a program that analyzed traffic data for his hometown.
Bill Gates introduces "Window 95" in Seattle BILL NATION-SYGMA	Windows Takes Over Soon after Gates unveiled his Windows 3.0 program in 1990, the applications software industry was crying uncle. Over 60 million copies of the Windows progam were sold, which established Microsoft's operating system as the PC software standard and left companies like Lotus and WordPerfect scrambling because they had been creating applications for IBM's system, the OS/2. Six years after the Windows launch, Microsoft dominates the word processing and spreadsheet market. Gates on the success of Microsoft. Audio courtesy of CNN: Larry King Live, August 21, 1995
Bill Gates talking with interns at outdoor company party in Seattle,1990 DALE WITTNER	Corporation as Cult The suburban Microsoft "campus," a cluster of 35 low-rise buildings, is set among lawns, groves of white pines and shady courtyards that make the place resemble a college. But in contrast to the sedate intellectualism of the average college, Microsoft rewards the brusque "math camp" mentality: a lot of cocky geeks willing to wave their fingers and yell with the cute conviction that all problems have a right answer. Among Gates' favorite phrases is "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," and victims wear it as a badge of honor, bragging about it the way they do about getting a late-night E-mail from him.