Microsoft Chairman and Co-Founder Bill Gates will be on the Harvard campus today, June 7, 2007, to get the one missing piece of his success portfolio, a degree. Gates is scheduled to speak at the Universities 356th Commencement, after which he will be awarded an honorary degree. Throughout the 32 years that have passed since his enrollment in 1973, Gates has returned to Harvard numerous times, but this time it will be different. Gates would have graduated from the American university in 1977, but he gave it up in order to pursue his vision with software programming and Microsoft.

Bill Gates is currently the world's wealthiest man. 51 years old, Gates' fortune is estimated to be in excess of $56.0 billion. In this context, Microsoft's Co-Founder is the leading man out of no less than 946 international billionaires. He owns it all to technology and he is also getting ready to leave the business as of next year. During his time at Harvard, Gates authored a version of the programming language BASIC for the MITS Altair, the first computer.

This is in fact the catalyst that led Gates to give up attending University. Bill Gates and Paul Allen created their version of BASIC without ever having seen an Altair computer. Despite this little detail, the two sold the program to Altair. However, Harvard had a different perspective over Gates' first step into an industry that he would end up revolutionizing. He was accused of running a business from the Harvard dorm room. Gates quit the University following the incident.

Gates departed from Harvard in his junior year and dedicated himself to an international success story fueled by the constant need for evolved software programs to keep the pace with the hardware development. But as of July 2008, Microsoft announced that Gates will transition out of his day-to-day role with the company in order to dedicate himself to his philanthropic work via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.