Bill Gates He is one of the richest people in the world and at this point in his life, in his role as a visionary and co-founder of Microsoft, he has tons of anecdotes. From the failure of Windows Vista, to the rebirth of its Operating System with Windows 8going through the anecdote of his arrest.
We recently revisited that dark moment in their recent history when they released version View of its platform under the idea of launching the company fully at the dawn of the 21st century. But as we all saw it was an absolute failure from which they took a long time to get ahead.
But if there is something that he knows how to do well Bill Gates it is getting away with it, finding yourself in some situations that anyone could think of as undesirable and still coming out ahead, smiling and with a very crooked anecdote that only the most devoted to the study of his biography would understand.
That is exactly the case of how in some versions of his operating system the champion has managed to hide the photograph of when he was arrested as part of the interface of his platform. But to understand this story it is necessary to go in parts.
How Bill Gates was arrested and how the police photo ended up in Windows 8
It was the last days of 1977, Microsoft was barely a couple of years after it was founded, on April 4, 1975, and things were going well for him, although he had already had “problems” with the law.
Specifically, the genius was arrested, not once, but twice, both times committing more or less the same felony: speeding his car breaking the law.
An arrest occurred in his hometown of Bellevue in Washington for running a stop light sign. That was a minor offense, but the arrest that earned him the mugshot that went viral was in New Mexico.
On that occasion, Bill Gates decided to take a ride in one of his Porsches, where he again passed a stop sign and then began a slight police pursuit, where he was driving without a driver’s license, which is highly punishable in the town.
The boy ended up arrested and with the image that we see above that has gone down in history. But then, what nobody counted on is that that image would end up inside Windows 8 as the default image for new users’ profile pictures:
During the development of Windows 8 (2012), in builds 8161-8176 from late 2011/early 2012, an oddly-detailed generic user account picture was presented. It was a nod to the now infamous mugshot of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, taken in 1977 for a traffic violation. 🫣 pic.twitter.com/KvPWzzMUpX
—Windows On Windows (@wowstartsnow) June 9, 2023
Later, in Outlook 2010, the Social Connector functionality was integrated, retaking exactly that icon for generic profile images.
But what is not known is whether Gates himself decided to immortalize that portrait in his operating system or someone from the development team.