Gates came from a wealthy family; his great-grandfather made a fortune in banking and left Bill a trust fund worth millions in today’s dollars. After dropping out of Harvard in 1975, Gates leveraged his passion for software engineering to launch Microsoft in an era when most Americans still used typewriters. At the time, his mother, Mary Gates, a prominent Seattle businesswoman, sat on the United Way board alongside then-IBM chairman John Opel. In 1980, IBM was looking to recruit a software concern to develop an operating system for its personal computer. Mary Gates persuaded Opel to take a
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