Veterans of Silicon Valley will tell us that the most important date in the history of the personal computer revolution was January 1975. These men will prove this.

Bill Gates: October 28, 1955

He was born in Seattle on October 28, 1955. At 13, Gates took an interest in programming a GE computer in BASIC at his prep school and would soon write his first computer program, a tic-tac-toe game that users could play against the computer.

Gates’s best friend at Lakeside was his future business partner, Paul Allen. He hung out in the computer room with Gates and shared those long evenings at ISI and C-Cubed. Allen went on to found Microsoft with Bill Gates.

After being banned from using a school computer, along with Paul Allen,  when they were caught using a bug to get free time on it, Gates began working for the company that owned the computer looking for bugs in exchange for time using it. There he developed a payroll program and a scheduling program for his school. Source: https://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/edn-moments/4423408/Bill-Gates-is-born–October-28–1955-

Paul Allen: January 21, 1953

Born in 1953 in Seattle, Washington, Paul Allen met fellow Lakeside School student and computer enthusiast Bill Gates when Allen was 14 and Gates was 12. Less than a decade later, in 1975, college drop-outs Allen and Gates founded Microsoft.

Allen, who was from Washington State University, founded Microsoft intending to design software for the new wave of personal computers. By the time Allen arranged for Microsoft to buy an operating system called Q-DOS for $50,000, the company had already supplied software for emerging companies such as Apple and Commodore. Gates and Allen reinvented Q-DOS as MS-DOS and installed it as the operating system for IBM’s PC offering, which dominated the market after its release in 1981. Source: https://www.biography.com/people/paul-allen-9542239

Steve Jobs: February 24, 1955

Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco, California. Jobs experimented with different pursuits before starting Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak in 1976. Apple’s revolutionary products, which include the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

Jobs and Wozniak are credited with revolutionizing the computer industry by democratizing the technology and making machines smaller, cheaper, intuitive, and accessible to everyday consumers. Source: https://www.biography.com/people/steve-jobs-9354805

Eric Schmidt: April 27, 1955

Eric Schmidt is an American information technology executive who served (2001–11) as chairman and CEO of Google Inc., overseeing the vast expansion of the company’s activities.

Schmidt grew up in Blacksburg, Virginia, where his father was a professor of economics at Virginia Tech. He entered Princeton University as an architecture student but changed his major to electrical engineering before graduating in 1976. He then studied computer science (M.S., 1979; Ph.D., 1982) at the University of California, Berkeley.

From 1979 to 1983 Schmidt worked for the Xerox Corporation at its Xerox PARC installation in Palo Alto, California. He became a software manager at Sun Microsystems in 1983, only one year after the founding of the company. In 1985 he was promoted to vice president of Sun’s software products division, and in 1988 he became vice president of the Sun general systems group. In 1991 Sun Microsystems was reorganized, and Schmidt was made president of one of its offshoots, Sun Technology Enterprises. In 1994 he returned to Sun Microsystems as chief technology officer. At Sun he was involved in the development of the Java programming language, and he enthusiastically promoted its use in his capacity as a company executive. In 1997 Schmidt left Sun to become chairman and CEO of Novell, Inc. The tech company was then in need of innovative leadership, as its NetWare network operating system was losing market share to Microsoft NT. Schmidt’s efforts revived the company somewhat but could not reverse a long-term decline. Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Eric-Schmidt

Bill Joy: November 8, 1954

Bill Joy, in full William Nelson, is an American software developer, entrepreneur, and co-founder of the computer manufacturer Sun Microsystems. Joy devised a version of the UNIX operating system, Berkeley UNIX, that used the TCP/IP networking language, which placed UNIX servers at the forefront of the Internet revolution and the open-source movement. He also collaborated on both the Java programming language and the Jini networking system, which fostered connectivity between the Internet and household appliances.

He became one of the four founders of Sun Microsystems, one of the oldest and most important of Silicon Valley’s software companies. Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Bill-Joy

The three other founders of Sun Microsystems:

Scott McNealy: November 13, 1954

Vinod Khosla: January 28, 1955

Andy Bechtolsheim: September 30, 1955