[1] Born to father Wilbur Winblad and mother Elizabeth Stark, she and five other siblings grew up in Rushford and Farmington.

[5] After earning her master's degree, Winblad joined the Federal Reserve as a systems programmer where she worked for 13 months.

[6] In 1976, Winblad and three co-workers left the Federal Reserve to found Open Systems, Inc, an accounting software startup, bootstrapping the company with $500.

[9] It took nearly two years, however, to raise enough funds to launch it, with IBM and The St. Paul Companies as primary investors.

Every spring, as they had done for over a decade, Gates would spend a long weekend with Winblad at her beach cottage on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where they would ride dune buggies, hang-glide, walk on the beach, and share their thoughts about the world and themselves.