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50 free Bill Gates trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Bill Gates wrote his first program, a game of tic-tac-toe, on a Teletype bought with proceeds from a school rummage sale. He got banned from a computer company's mainframe for exploiting bugs, scored 1590 on the SAT, solved a pancake-sorting problem at Harvard that stood for 30 years, and told MITS he had a BASIC interpreter for the Altair before writing a line of it. Microsoft followed, then the IBM deal, Windows, the richest-man-in-the-world years and the largest private foundation on earth. This Bill Gates trivia quiz runs 50 questions across his life and work: Seattle and Lakeside, Kent Evans and Paul Allen, Traf-O-Data, Harvard and Steve Ballmer, Albuquerque and the Open Letter to Hobbyists, 86-DOS and Tim Paterson, the 1986 IPO, the 1998 antitrust deposition, Melinda French and the Lānaʻi wedding, Xanadu 2.0, the Codex Leicester, the Giving Pledge, TerraPower, farmland, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Time Persons of the Year, Source Code and more. Easy questions come first; the last third is for people who remember Ric Weiland. Every answer is verified against Wikipedia's biography of Gates, with the supporting sentence quoted under each question. Fans of this quiz should also try our Microsoft and tech billionaires quizzes.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft in 1975 with which childhood friend?
Paul Allen
Allen coined the name Micro-Soft, a blend of microcomputer and software; the hyphen lasted about a year.
Q 02Gates was born in 1955 in which city?
Seattle
The family home in Sand Point was damaged by a rare tornado when he was seven.
Q 03Gates is known in his family as "Trey" because he is the what of his name?
Fourth, but styled III
His father, a prominent lawyer, carried the II suffix, so the son became William Gates III.
Q 04Gates's parents originally wanted him to pursue which career?
Law
His father Bill Gates Sr. was a prominent lawyer; his mum sat on the boards of a bank and United Way.
Q 05At which private school did Gates meet his future co-founder and start programming?
Lakeside
The Mothers' Club bought a Teletype terminal and computer time with rummage-sale proceeds.
Q 06Gates's first computer program was an implementation of which game?
Tic-tac-toe
It ran on a General Electric system in BASIC and let users play against the computer.
Q 07Why did CCC ban the teenage Gates and friends from its PDP-10 one summer?
They exploited bugs to get free machine time
They later offered to find bugs in exchange for more time; Gates spent hours studying the system's programs.
Q 08Gates's best friend and first business partner Kent Evans died in their junior year how?
A mountain climbing accident
They had been automating the school's class schedules; Gates turned to Allen to finish it and called it one of the saddest days of his life.
Q 09Gates and Allen's teenage venture Traf-O-Data built what?
Traffic counters
They were based on the Intel 8008 processor.
Q 10What did Gates score on the SAT out of 1600?
1590
He also served as a congressional page in 1972 and was a National Merit Scholar.
Q 11Which notoriously hard Harvard course did Gates take?
Math 55
He never stayed long enough to choose a concentration, but did meet Microsoft's future second CEO there.
Q 12Gates's Harvard-era algorithm for which combinatorics problem held the speed record for over 30 years?
Pancake sorting
He wrote it up with Christos Papadimitriou; the successor algorithm is faster by only 2 percent.
Q 13Which 1975 machine, featured in Popular Electronics, prompted Gates and Allen to start their company?
MITS Altair 8800
They told MITS they had a BASIC interpreter for it before writing any code, then built an emulator and the interpreter in a few weeks.
Q 21Microsoft launched its first retail version of Windows on November 20 of which year?
1985
It was a response to the Macintosh's graphical interface.
Q 22Microsoft went public in which year?
1986
Gates kept 44.9 percent and was a billionaire by 1987, the youngest self-made one ever at 31.
Q 23How old was Gates when he became the world's youngest billionaire in 1987?
31
Forbes listed him at $1.25 billion in its first America's richest issue.
Q 24Gates became the world's first "centibillionaire" in which year?
Q 14Microsoft's first office was in which city, home of MITS?
Albuquerque
The company registered its trade name with the New Mexico secretary of state on November 26, 1976, and moved to Bellevue in 1979.
Q 15Who was the first employee Gates and Allen hired?
Ric Weiland
He was one of the four schoolboy programmers who had been banned from CCC's mainframe.
Q 16Gates's 1976 Open Letter to Hobbyists said over what share of Altair BASIC users hadn't paid?
90%
The letter was unpopular with hobbyists but set out his lifelong view that software should be paid for.
Q 17Who first mentioned Microsoft to IBM's CEO John Opel, leading to the 1980 IBM PC deal?
Gates's mother
Mary Gates sat on the United Way board with Opel.
Q 18When IBM first asked about an operating system, Gates referred them to which company?
Digital Research
Talks over CP/M went poorly, so Microsoft bought in 86-DOS from a small local firm instead.
Q 19The operating system Microsoft adapted for the IBM PC, 86-DOS, was written by whom?
Tim Paterson
Gates kept the copyright, betting correctly that others would clone IBM's hardware and need MS-DOS.
Q 20Gates's co-founder left Microsoft in early 1983 after being diagnosed with what?
Hodgkin lymphoma
The partnership was already strained by an equity dispute; the two later reconciled and stayed friends until Allen's death in 2018.
1999
Forbes ranked him the world's richest person for 18 of the 24 years from 1995 to 2017.
Q 25Who succeeded Gates as Microsoft CEO in 2000?
Steve Ballmer
Gates became chief software architect until 2008; Nadella took over from Ballmer in 2014.
Q 26Gates stepped down as Microsoft chairman in 2014 to become technology adviser to which new CEO?
Satya Nadella
He left the board altogether in 2020.
Q 27With which lawyer did Bill Gates spar over the meaning of 'compete' in his 1998 antitrust deposition?
David Boies
The judge was seen laughing and shaking his head as clips played; Gates later pleaded "rudeness to Boies in the first degree."
Q 28Where did Gates meet Melinda French in 1987?
At a trade fair in New York
She had joined Microsoft about four months earlier; they married on New Year's Day 1994.
Q 29Bill and Melinda Gates married in 1994 on the 12th hole of a golf course on which Hawaiian island?
Lānaʻi
The Manele course was designed by Jack Nicklaus; the couple divorced in 2021 after 27 years.
Q 30How many children do Bill and Melinda Gates have?
Three
Jennifer is a paediatrician and show-jumper, Rory a PhD student and Phoebe a fashion-tech founder.