What Happened on October 28th
October 28, 1955
Bill Gates, Co-Founder and CEO of Microsoft Corporation Born
Bill Gates developed a version of BASIC for the Altair 8800 while a student at Harvard. With the success of BASIC, he and co-developer Paul Allen founded Microsoft. The fledgling company delivered an operating system for the IBM PC, the Microsoft Word word processing program, the Windows operating system, and a multitude of other programs.
Gates stepped down as Microsoft CEO in 1999 and was replaced by President Steve Ballmer. Although he remained closely tied to Microsoftβs vision and operations, Gates devoted more of his time to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a philanthropic entity that, among other goals, promotes worldwide health initiatives, educational opportunities, and a means to end poverty and hunger.
Even after all of his charitable giving, Gates has been listed as the worldβs richest person more than once by Forbes.
October 28, 1937
Microprocessor Co-Inventor Hoff Born
Dr. Marcian Edward (Ted) Hoff, Jr. is born October 28, 1937 at Rochester, New York.
He received a BEE (1958) from Rensselear Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. During the summers away from college he worked for General Railway Signal Company in Rochester where he made developments that produced his first two patents. He attended Stanford as a National Science Foundation Fellow and received a MS (1959) and PhD (1962) in electrical engineering. He joined Intel in 1968. In 1980, he was named the first Intel Fellow, the highest technical position in the company.
He spent a brief time as vice president for technology with Atari in the early 1980s and was vice president and chief technical officer with Teklicon, Inc., a patent and intellectual property advisory firm.