Early life Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, to William H. Gates, Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates. His family was rich; his father was a prominent lawyer, his mother served on the board of directors of First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way, and his father, J. W. Maxwell, was president of a national bank. Gates has an older sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and a younger sister, Libby. He was the fourth of his name in his family, but was known as William Gates III or "Trey" because his father had dropped his own "III" suffix. Very early in his life, Gates' parents had a legal career in mind for him.[7] At thirteen, he enrolled at Lakeside School, an exclusive prep school.[8] When he was in eighth grade, the school's Mothers Club used proceeds from the Lakeside school rummage sale to purchase an ASR-33 teletype terminal and a block of computing time on a General Electric computer ( GE) for the students of the school. ] Gates became interested in programming the GE system in BASIC and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it always executed software code perfectly. When he thought back on that moment, he commented on it and said, “There was just something interesting about the machine. » Once the Mothers Club donation ran out, he and other students sought time on systems, including the DEC PDP minicomputers. One of those systems was a PDP-10 owned by Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students – Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland and Kent Evans – over the summer after catching them trying to 'exploit bugs in the operating system. get free computer time.[11] When the ban ended, the four students offered to debug CCC's software in exchange for free computer time. Rather than operating the system by teletype, Gates visited the CCC offices and studied the source code of various programs running on the system, including FORTRAN, LISP, and machine language. The agreement with CCC continued until 1970, when the company ceased operations. The following year, Information Sciences Inc. hired the four Lakeside students to write a payroll program in COBOL, providing them with computer time and royalties. After his administrators became aware of his programming abilities, Gates wrote the school's computer program to plan students' lessons..