The inscrutable, geeky computer deity who holds the world's imagination and half of its software in his grasp started out in middle school creating programs on a crude terminal in the teletype room with three fascinated friends. A reflexive entrepreneur, the 13-year-old Gates sold their scheduling programs and troubleshooting manuals to local schools and companies. While in high school, the group of enthusiasts formed a company called Traf-O-Data, through which they earned $20,000 selling traffic-counting systems to municipalities, before customers found out that they were in their teens. At 17, Gates worked for a summer as a congressional page (and made a large profit selling outdated campaign buttons as collectors' items), but quickly returned to his old fixation, getting a programmer's position at TRW, a large software firm.

As a sophomore at Harvard University in 1975, Gates and his high school friend Paul Allen read in Popular Electronics about the world's first commercially available microcomputer, MITS' softwareless Altair 8800 - and the pair quickly perceived the vast software vacuum that would be opened up by the Altair and its successors in the now-accelerating flood of computer technology. They worked day and night to create a new version of the BASIC computer language for the Altair, trying to beat the world's other computer hobbyists to it. They succeeded; MITS bought their system and offered them office space in Albuquerque. Gates dropped out of Harvard and the two established the Microsoft partnership to sell their new program, working first out of a hotel room and then a sagebrush-spotted Albuquerque strip mall. MITS was soon drummed out of business by Apple, but the other commercial PCs were so similar to the original that Microsoft could easily adapt its programs to their specifications. ~

What finally pulled Gates into the economic stratosphere in the early 1980s was IBM's commission to fashion an operating system for their new personal computer. Microsoft, in turn, bought a simple operating system from a Seattle programmer, modified it, and sold it to IBM, quietly keeping their hands on the copyright. The result, MS-DOS, is now used in most of the 70 million IBM and IBM-compatible PCs at work around the world.

An early-blooming curiosity about unexplored areas could not alone have brought Gates this far, if it had not been joined to an ever-present search for profit potential and a wary siege mentality - his constant overestimation of the competition allowed their blunders to give him the maximum upward leverage. As Gates' company, now one of the world's most powerful corporations, tries to incorporate the newer world of the Internet, the important question is whether it can still practice his brand of light-footed, ultra-modern capitalism. The government's anti-trust suit against Microsoft, filed in 1997, would seem to argue no - but it remains to be seen whether Gates will eventually prevail.