Bill Gates attended to a bit of unfinished business last night when he collected an honorary degree.
Gates, who dropped out of Harvard and co-founded Microsoft to become the world's richest person, stopped off at his former stomping grounds to collect the honorary law degree.
"We recognise the most illustrious member of the Harvard College class of 1977 never to have graduated from Harvard," said Harvard University Provost Steven Hyman. "It seems high time that his alma mater hand over the diploma."
"I've been waiting for more than 30 years to say this, Dad, I always told you I'd come back and get my degree," Gates (51) told the crowd, which included his father, also named Bill.
"I'll be changing my job next year, and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume," said Gates in a reference to his plan to shift full-time into philanthropy.
In 1980, Gates and his colleagues at Microsoft were canny enough to negotiate an agreement with IBM that gave the start-up software company the right to license its operating system for a new generation of personal computers to other manufacturers.
That arrangement ultimately shifted power from hardware manufacturers to software programmers. Today, hundreds of companies make brand-name personal computers, yet more than 90 per cent of those machines use Microsoft's Windows operating system.