Simonyi was born in Budapest, Hungary, the son of Károly Simonyi, a professor of electrical engineering at Technical University of Budapest. While in high school he worked part-time as a night watchman at a computer laboratory, overseeing a large Soviet Ural II mainframe. He took an interest in computing and learned to program from one of the laboratory`s engineers. By the time he left school, he had learned to develop compilers and sold one of these to a government department. He was hired by Denmark`s A/S Regnecentralen in 1966 and moved to the United States in 1968 to attend the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his B.S. in Engineering Mathematics, specializing in Mathematics and Statistics, in 1972.

Simonyi then went to Stanford University for graduate studies and was hired by Xerox PARC during its most productive period, working alongside luminaries Alan Kay, Butler Lampson and Robert Metcalfe. He and Lampson developed Bravo, the first WYSIWYG document preparation program. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford in 1977 with a dissertation on a software project management technique called "metaprogramming." This approach sought to defeat Brooks`s law by requiring all programmers to communicate through the manager rather than directly.

In 1981, at Metcalfe`s suggestion, he applied directly to Bill Gates for a job at Microsoft. At the firm, Simonyi oversaw the development of what became its most profitable products, Word and Excel, as well as Excel`s predecessor Multiplan. With Multiplan, Simonyi pursued a strategy called the "revenue bomb", whereby the product ran on a virtual machine that was ported to each platform. The resulting application was highly portable, although Simonyi did not foresee the rapid adoption of MS-DOS that made such efforts less important.[2][3] Simonyi introduced the techniques of object-oriented programming that he had learned at Xerox to Microsoft and developed the Hungarian notation convention for naming variables that has been widely adopted.

Simonyi remained at Microsoft during its meteoric rise in the software industry, becoming one of its highest-ranking developers. He left abruptly in 2002 to co-found, with business partner Gregor Kiczales, a company called Intentional Software.[4] This company markets the intentional programming concepts Simonyi developed at Microsoft Research. In this approach to software, a programmer first builds a toolbox specific to a given problem domain (such as life insurance). Domain experts, aided by the programmer, then describe the program`s intended behavior in a WYSIWYG-like manner. An automated system uses the program description and the toolbox to generate the final program. Successive changes are only done at the WYSIWYG level.[5]

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

Simonyi has been an active philanthropist. In 1995 he established an endowed chair for the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, the first and current occupant of which is Richard Dawkins. He also established a Charles Simonyi Professor for Innovation in Teaching endowed chair at Stanford University. In January 2004, Simonyi created the $50 million Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences, through which Simonyi plans to support Seattle-area arts, science, and educationa

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