He introduced the graphical user interface to Bill Gates for the first time who later described it as the first of two revolutionary things he felt in his life.

His father, Károly Simonyi, was a Kossuth Prize-winning professor of electrical engineering[7] at the Technical University of Budapest, and created the first Hungarian nuclear particle accelerator.

[8] While in secondary school he worked part-time as a night watchman at a computer laboratory in the early 1960s, overseeing a large Soviet Ural II[9] mainframe.

[13] He subsequently moved from Denmark to the United States in 1968 to attend the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his BS in Engineering Mathematics & Statistics in 1972 under Butler Lampson.

During this time he received his PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 1977 with a dissertation on a software project management technique he called meta-programming.

In the 1992 book Accidental Empires (ISBN 0-88730-855-4), Robert X. Cringely gave this description: Simonyi's dissertation was an attempt to describe a more efficient method of organizing programmers to write software... the metaprogrammer was the designer, decision maker, and communication controller in a software development group.... individual programmers were allowed to make no design decisions about the project.

In 1997, Simonyi was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for developing widely used desktop productivity software.

For the applications, Simonyi pursued a strategy called the "revenue bomb", whereby the product ran on a virtual machine that was ported to each platform.

He left Microsoft in 2002 to co-found, with business partner Gregor Kiczales, a company called Intentional Software.

[24] In this approach to software, a programmer first builds a language environment specific to a given problem domain (such as life insurance).

[25] In 2004, Simonyi received the Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award for the industry-wide impact of his innovative work in information technology.

[29] In February 2017, Simonyi and his wife Lisa gave the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) department $5 million towards the completion of a new building.

[30] Simonyi was one of few notable early supporters of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign when he made the maximum primary donation of $2,700 in 2015.

They were married on November 22, 2008 in a private ceremony in Gothenburg, Sweden, attended by their closest friends, among them Bill Gates.

He shared a ride with two Russian cosmonauts to the International Space Station,[9] and returned aboard Soyuz TMA-9, landing on April 21, 2007.

Earlier, the Hungarians were the seventh nation to be represented in space, in 1980, by Bertalan Farkas's spaceflight, 27 years before Simonyi's first one, in 2007.

[53] On March 30, 2009 he held a phone conversation with students at the Girls' Middle School in Mountain View, California, United States in which he said that one of the most surprising things about traveling to space was that upon returning to Earth the air feels very thick, very heavy, like "breathing Pepto-Bismol."

Simonyi used his Hungarian call sign HA5SIK[54] when he contacted 25 radio amateurs from Hungary in a record attempt on April 12.

Simonyi was portrayed by actor Brian Lester in the TV film Pirates of Silicon Valley.