Bob O'Rear

Robert "Bob" O'Rear is a former employee of Microsoft, and is among the group of eleven early Microsoft employees who posed for an iconic company photo taken in Albuquerque in 1978. A Texan, he has degrees in mathematics and physics. He left Microsoft in 1993, and reportedly owns a cattle ranch in Texas. His net worth is reported to be about $100 million.

O'Rear, born in Wellington, Texas, was brought up in Perryton, a rural town of 3,500 people in the Texas Panhandle by his grandparents, who were sharecroppers on a cotton farm. O'Rear planned to be a physical education teacher, but later ended up graduating from the University of Texas at El Paso with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. He went on to graduate school to study maths and astrophysics.

In 1966, TRW in Redondo Beach hired O'Rear to work on Air Force spy satellite programs that determined which photographs were taken and how. He also wrote programs that optimized the trajectory of Minutemen missiles during the Cold War. Later on, in the 1960s, he went to work for NASA. He helped write a program that determined the trajectory of the Apollo Command Module as it reentered the Earth's atmosphere, and was in the NASA Command Center when Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon.

Later in the 1970s, O'Rear and his friend from his TRW days found a company called Texametrics that made automated machinery for the manufacturing extrusion business for polyurethane bottle caps. O'Rear worked on a program which analyzed the patterns of correctly manufactured caps and caused the incorrectly manufactured parts to be ejected. During this time, O'Rear worked with both hardware and software that helped him later when he joined Microsoft.

O'Rear first joined Microsoft in 1977 and became the seventh employee. He went to work as the company's chief mathematician and project manager [1]. He learned how programs were put together and also reworked some of the math code in them. After the success of the MS-DOS and the IBM PC, O'Rear became the director of international sales and marketing. O'Rear is considered one of the key people in Microsoft's history and success.

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