She would bribe him with candy and money from her own pocket just to get him to learn. He became addicted to learning so much that he skipped the fifth grade and went straight to middle school. He grew up in a neighborhood surrounded with electricians and engineers. At the age of thirteen he met a memorable person named Stephan Wozniak, his future business partner and best friend. .
Once Gates graduated Lakeside, he enrolled at Harvard University in the fall essentially for law. He spent hours, sometimes even days in the computer lab. He spent so much time in there that he started missing a majority of his classes. His study habits were very unusual. He would get a few hours of sleep, cram for the test and pass with a acceptable grade. Gates kept in touch with Paul Allen who attended Washington State University for two years then dropped out and moved to Boston to work for Honeywell. Bill then joined Allen at Honeywell where he showed Bill a Popular Electronics magazine that featured an article on the Altair 8800 mini-computer kit. They both were fascinated with the possibilities this computer could make toward personal computing. They called the company that produced the Altair and pitched a very innovative idea to them and luckily they were looking for what Bill and Allen had to offer. They spent the next two months writing the software at Harvard's computer lab. .
Allen was hired at MITS which was located in Albuquerque, New Mexico and soon after Gates left Harvard, displeasing his parents. In 1975, Gates and Allen formed a partnership they called Micro-soft. Because the software was free and obtainable by computer hobbyists who were reproducing and distributing them for free, Gates wrote a letter saying that continued distribution and use of the software without paying for it would "prevent good software from being written." Gates had a very unique relations ship with the president of MITS, often resulting to shouting matches.