“The lion’s share of our work is done here—and will always be done here,” he said.

While officially condemning illegal file-sharing, Gates struck a measured tone on the issue and acknowledged many of his products facilitate the practice.

Gates said media industries were partly to blame for initially resisting digital technology.

“It’s made it too easy for people not to license,” he said.

Gates and his former classmate-turned-business-partner Steven A. Ballmer ’77 donated $25 million to Harvard in 1996 for the creation of a new computer science building.

The building, Maxwell Dworkin, was dedicated by Ballmer three years later, but Gates said he had not stepped inside until yesterday.

Gates has long maintained—and repeated yesterday—that computer programming lured him away from Harvard. But a 1993 biography said Gates dropped out when Harvard objected to his use of University computers for private business.

“There was a flap, no question about it,” Gates’ father, William H. Gates Sr., told the Boston Globe in 1998. “My son felt put upon by the Harvard administration’s attitude.”

Gates’ departure grouped him with a host of Harvard dropouts who achieved post-Cambridge fame.

Edwin Land, Class of 1930, invented the Polaroid camera after dropping out and went on to pay for the building of Harvard’s Polaroid-camera-shaped Science Center.

But drop-out William Randolph Hearst, Class of 1886, snubbed Harvard fundraisers after forming the nation’s largest media empire. Hearst instead financed the castle of the Harvard Lampoon, a semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine.

—Staff writer Zachary M. Seward can be reached at seward@fas.harvard.edu.