Gates, Wife To Introduce Baby96 Software Billionaire, Spouse Expecting First Child In May

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates changed the course of the computer industry. Now he’ll find out if he can change a diaper.

Melinda French, wife of the software tycoon, is expecting. The couple’s first child is scheduled to be downloaded in late May.

As news of the pregnancy moved from virtual to reality Thursday, the good-natured quips moved faster than a 120-megahertz Pentium processor.

“My first question is, what’s the kid’s Net address?” asked Dan Rosenbaum, editor of NetGuide magazine. “Inutero.com?”

Microsoft spokeswoman Pam Edstrom said the mother’s health is good. French, 31, and Gates, 40, were married Jan. 1, 1994, in the Hawaiian Islands.

The sex of the baby is not known, Edstrom said, and the parents don’t plan on finding out until the delivery. French is an executive in Microsoft’s consumer division.

Whatever the baby’s sex, he or she will be heir to what is certainly one of the largest personal fortunes in the world. Forbes magazine two months ago estimated Gates’ net worth at $14 billion. Most of that wealth is in the form of Microsoft stock; Gates owns more than 142 million shares, or nearly 25 percent of the company.

In his younger days, the workaholic Gates was said to be at best ambivalent about children. He once said that “kids are a problem” and “babies are a subset,” according to a computer industry official. In his new book, “The Road Ahead,” Gates said the $30-million mansion he is building on Lake Washington was originally designed as a bachelor pad, “but when Melinda and I got married we changed the plan to make it more suitable for a family.”

Gates has exhibited a more fatherly side of late. In a recent television interview with David Frost, Gates said that much of his energy over the next few years will be directed toward raising and not spoiling his children.

“That’s a difficult problem,” Gates said about the hazards of growing up super rich. “Certainly not allowing kids to have a lot of things that they want when they are growing up, making them do their daily chores, putting them on the right kind of allowance - I mean, I know the things my parents did that I believe in very much. … I hope to do as well raising children as my parents did.”

Gates has said he plans to give away as much as 95 percent of his fortune, instead of passing it to future generations. “They’ll have enough,” he once told Playboy magazine. “They’ll be comfortable.”

The disclosure that a new Gates is under development touched off impromptu baby-naming contests throughout Seattle. Among suggestions during a KIRO-AM radio call-in show:

MS-TOT (after the computer program that made Gates rich, MS-DOS).

Virtual Infant.

Bob (an oddly named and less-than-popular Microsoft program).

William Henry Gates 4.0.

Scratch that last one. Although four family generations have carried the William Henry Gates moniker (Gates is William Henry III), that tradition has been deemed obsolete.

The baby “will not be named Bill, William or Melinda,” Edstrom said. “I think that they’ve pretty much ruled it out.”