Bill Gates is back in the news after his long-time friend Steve Ballmer announced his retirement.
The reasons for Ballmer's retirement remain fuzzy, but there are indications that Ballmer and Gates thought it was time for Ballmer to move on.
A lot of people are calling for Gates to replace Ballmer as CEO. He founded Microsoft, and led it in the 1980s and '90s, creating a personal computing monopoly with Windows.
He's unlikely to return as CEO. While he remains chairman at Microsoft, he left the company in 2008 to focus on his foundation, which is doing good around the world.
In appreciation of Gates, here's a look back at his life.
Gates grew up in Seattle, son of a lawyer. He was a super smart, difficult kid.
Gates read every word of the encyclopedia growing up. His parents would pay for any book he would read. At age 11, he really "blossomed intellectually" and developed into a bit of a pain for his parents, according to a WSJ profile of the family.
At 13, he went to Lakeside School in Seattle, a private school where he discovered computers.
"Lakeside was one of the best things that ever happened to me,"says Bill Gates. Lakeside had computers, and Gates and his friend Paul Allen played with the computers. "The experience and insight Paul Allen and I gained [at Lakeside] gave us the confidence to start a company based on this wild idea that nobody else agreed with—that computer chips were going to become so powerful that computers and software would become a tool that would be on every desk and in every home."
After Lakeside, Gates went to Harvard.
At Harvard, Gates met Steve Ballmer. Gates was only in Harvard for two years before dropping out to start Microsoft with Paul Allen.
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