“We hope the foundation’s gift will help the school continue to excel and push the envelope of human understanding and innovation.”

William H. Gates III
Melinda French Gates
Co-chairs of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

When Bill Gates was 13 and a student at Lakeside School in Seattle, he became interested in software and began programming computers. Bill entered Harvard in 1973, where he developed a version of the programming language BASIC for the first microcomputer. When he was a junior, Bill left Harvard to focus on a company which he and a childhood friend, Paul Allen, had started in 1975—Microsoft. Believing that computers would be useful tools in both offices and homes, they began to create software for personal computers.

Melinda French earned her B.S. in computer science and economics and an M.B.A. at Duke before joining Microsoft in 1987. Melinda was a leader in the development of many of Microsoft’s multimedia products and general manager of information products until her retirement in 1996. Bill and Melinda married in 1994 and have three children.

Deeply committed to promoting greater equity in health and learning, Bill and Melinda established the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It has supported hundreds of global and national initiatives, including the path-breaking Vaccine Fund and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, as well as the Gates Library Initiative to provide computers and Internet access at public libraries and the Gates Millennium Scholars Program for underrepresented minority students. Based in Seattle, the foundation also works to promote strategies and programs that help low-income families in its local region.

Through the foundation, the Gateses made their transformational, lead gift to Carnegie Mellon for construction of the Gates Center for Computer Science in September 2004. “Carnegie Mellon has made phenomenal contributions in engineering and computer science,” Bill said during a visit to campus in February 2004.

“Our goal is for this new building to be a catalyst for computer science breakthroughs,” Bill says. “We hope the foundation’s gift will help the school continue to excel and push the envelope of human understanding and innovation.”

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