You will have to forgive me for going off on a tangent on this one... Bill Gate's mom got him a sweetheart deal with IBM through her connections. He bought 86-DOS 1.10 for $75,000 from Tim Paterson in May of 1981 and hired Tim and others to tweak it and became fabulously wealthy after “licensing” that product to IBM.
From that point forward the team he assembled largely exploited the ideas of others, sometimes paying the innovators and sometimes not. Apple's graphical user interface, Windows, and others can all be traced back to Douglas Engelbart’s Augmentation of Human Intellect project in the 1960s which led directly to the advances at Xerox PARC who developed the Alto personal computer in the early 1970s.
Steve Jobs supposedly saw the Xerox Alto in 1979 and hired others to imitate it in a form that could be used on Apple hardware resulting in the failed LISA computer released in 1983 and then the successful MAC in 1984. Microsoft started work on a Graphical Interface Program in 1981 but did not announce it until 1983 after the LISA was released but before the success of the MAC. But they were no doubt spurred on by Apple's work and released the first version of Windows in 1985.
Gates founded Microsoft in 1975 with Paul Allan to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. He was at the right place at the right time when his mother was able to arrange introductions resulting in a sweetheart deal with long time computer giant IBM in 1981. But other than being the head of Microsoft from 1975 to 2000 and having others do the development work, he had little if anything to do with the nuts and bolts of the “Windows desktop” that we know and love today.
