The image you see above is almost forty years old now! Can you recognize anyone from this picture? Probably not, except for the young man in the bottom left corner. Yes, these are Bill Gates and the very first employees of Microsoft Company. It seems unbelievable, but these people are responsible for the products we use every day, and we don’t even know their names! Let’s correct this mistake together. If you want to achieve the same, start simple – find a decent job on Jiji.
Bill Gates
At the age of 13 he wrote his first program – tic-tac-toe, and that’s arguably the moment when his life has changed forever. Bill dropped out from Harvard, founded and built Microsoft, collected a fortune, signed off from Microsoft in 2014 and now his only role is a philanthropist – he founded Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with his wife.
Andrea Lewis
Not much is known about her before she started working for Microsoft. Andrea was a woman behind technical documentation for Microsoft products. After leaving the company in 1983, she worked as a freelance journalist and fiction writer. Despite this, she still has Microsoft options, so her net worth is estimated to be around 2 million dollars.
Marla Wood
Marla Wood worked as an administrative assistant and bookkeeper for Microsoft. She left the company just two years after the photo was taken and after sued them for sexual discrimination. The case was settled, though, and now she is married to another person on this picture, became a mom and a “professional volunteer”.
Steve Wood
Steve was one of the programmers for the company, but left it just after his wife. Now, he is a chairman and a co-founder of SinglePoint Corporation, and his and Marla’s net worth is estimated to be $15 million.
Paul Allen
Paul is the second famous guy on this photo – he occupies the 21 place on Forbes’s list of the richest people of the world. He met Bill at school, on programming class. Their team-up have created the company, but Paul left it in 1983 because he didn’t want to concentrate on one thing. Since 2000, he has invested a lot into space exploration, telecommunication and even american football.
Bob O’Rear
This man was a chief mathematician for the company. His backstory is the most amazing one – he was at NASA in Mission Control when the US landed on the moon! But now his life is as boring as it was exiting then – he lives in Texas and works at his farm (although his worth is estimated at $100 million)
Bob Greenberg
Bob helped the company to develop a new version of BASIC for their software. He went on to help to develop the Cabbage Patch Kid dolls for his family company, which became a huge hit.
Marc McDonald
This guy was the first salaried Microsoft employee, but left the company, after it got “too big” (around 400 employees). He later rejoined the company, but left again in 2011 to start one on his own.
Bob Wallace
The ninth Microsoft employee first worked at the Retail Computer Store, where he learnt about the Microsoft through a sign advertisement. After Microsoft, he founded software company Quicksoft and gave money for the research of psychedelic drugs. Unfortunately, he died in 2002 of pneumonia.
Gordon Letwin
Another programmer, Gordon stayed on with the company till 1993 (longer than anyone on the picture, except for Gates). His worth now is estimated to be $20 million.
Jim Lane
Jim was a project manager, that later was responsible for close partnership between Microsoft and Intel. He left the company in 1985 and went on to create a software company on his own.
