World Life Cafe

                        Bill Gates married Melinda French of Dallas, Texas on January 1, 1994. Melinda has given birth to three children, Jennifer Katharine Gates (1996), Rory John Gates (1999) and Phoebe Adele Gates (2002). Bill Gates' house is one of the most expensive houses in the world, and is a modern 21st century earth-sheltered home in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington. According to King County public records, as of 2006, the total assessed value of the property (land and house) is $125 million, and the annual property tax is just under $1 million. Also among Gates's private acquisitions are the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci which Gates bought for $30.8 million at an auction in 1994, and a rare Gutenberg Bible.

                  1. Inspiring the era of the home computer During the late 1960s, Bill Gates and his school friend Paul Allen learnt the BASIC programming language whilst studying at Lakeside School in Seattle. BASIC's popularity stemmed from the fact that it was simple to use for beginners, but had functionality that could be stretched by advanced coders. While BASIC was designed in 1963, it wasn't until Gates and Allen produced a version for the Altair 8800 that it really started to fly. In 1975, the two sold the code to MITS for $3,000. BASIC sparked the home computing boom of the 1980s, appearing on the IBM PC, Commodore VIC-20, BBC Micro and the Apple II (to name but a few). 2. Commercialising the operating system Gates and Allen founded Microsoft in 1976. In 1980, the company inked a landmark deal with IBM to produce an operating system for its up-and-coming personal computer (PC). Microsoft bo...