It wasn’t all that long ago – 1975, that computer whiz Bill Gates founded what is now the dominant manufacturer of computer software. So dominant that the company has faced anti-trust allegations from the federal government.

Bill Gates was only 19 years old when he founded the business with this friend Paul Gardner Allen and he had dropped out of Harvard to do so. It paid off: Gates was a billionaire by age 30. Though he’s undoubtedly a maths ace (he scored perfect 800 in maths on his SATs and began writing programs when he was 13), Bill Gates has more than once credited the success of Microsoft Corporation not to his own programming skills – but to hiring the best programming talent for his Washington-based company.