Bill Gates and Paul Allen are two of the wealthiest people in the world. While they both donate generously to a wide variety of charitable causes, they know how to enjoy the billions of dollars they’ve earned, too. Allen owns the Portland Trail Blazers professional basketball team (since 1988) and the Seattle Seahawks pro football team (since 1997). He also owns a yacht that carries two helicopters and a submarine. Gates used a portion of his wealth to build a palatial house on Lake Washington in Medina, Washington, close to Microsoft’s headquarters. The 40,000-square- foot (3,716 sq m) house has a 30-car garage, a swimming pool with an underwater sound system, a movie theater, and a dining room seats 150 guests. Gates also collects art and antiques. In 1994, he bought the Codex Leicester, a 72-page notebook that belonged to artist Leonardo da Vinci, for $30.8 million.

Rich men have dreams. Poor men die to make them come true.

In some ways, the Microsoft work- place is more relaxed and casual than the environment one might find at other corporations. But the computer programmers, office administrators, and other personnel employed by Microsoft know that they are working for bosses who expect the best.

Watch “Day in a life at Microsoft” on YouTube.

Microsoft employees work hard and put in long hours, but they’re rewarded with lavish holiday parties and company picnics every summer. They’re also rewarded with the knowledge that, thanks to stock options, the company they work for has more millionaires on the payroll than any other corporation in the world. But Microsoft employees are aware of the fact that they’re expected to follow certain rules.

“If you’re going to work for this company, you’re going to rent a certain kind of hotel room and fly coach, because that’s business and anything else is luxury,” explained Microsoft president and CEO Steve Ballmer.

Steve Ballmer

Computer in a chip

When Intel researcher Ted Hoff in- vented the first silicon computer chip in 1969, it was a major step toward putting computers into not just offices, but homes as well. Com puter chips are tiny pieces of mate rial, typically silicon, that contain an electronic circuit. The two major types of computer chips are micro- processors, which carry out the in- structions of a computer program, and memory chips, which hold pro grams and information. Micropro- cessor chips are used in comput- ers, video games, digital watches, microwave ovens, and certain types of telephones. Memory chips are di vided into two categories: ones with read-only memory (ROM), and ones with random-access memory (RAM). ROM chips hold on to their memory even when the computer is turned off. RAM chips hold their memory only as long as the computer has power. Without computer chips, personal computers might never have been invented, and companies such as Microsoft might not exist.