There would be another 11 years before Gates, a student at Harvard, founded Microsoft, in 1975, with his friend Paul Allen. The rest of the book recounts childhood battles with his parents over bad grades, seeing a therapist who helped him process his arrogance and anger, and getting precious access to a rare computer at his private school. Along with a few high school classmates, an enterprising Gates started doing computer work for fun and profit.
As a teenager, Gates would sneak out his bedroom window to code all night at a computer lab. At Harvard, trying to make room for studying as well as programming, he “could be awake for 36 hours at a stretch.” He admits that his schedule “seemed extreme to my friends,” but like a lot of tech entrepreneurs, he is also evidently proud of it. This grinding, round-the-clock approach to work is why he would later insist on splitting ownership of Microsoft with Allen 64-36 — bumping up Gates’s share from the 60-40 split that Allen had already agreed to. He feels “bad” about it now, but he still thinks it was right.
When Gates was a child he used to believe that “if you truly were smart, you’d be able to get an A with as little effort as possible.” Trying to seem “cool,” he hid the effort he put into school, even going so far as to procure two sets of textbooks, so that he could leave one set at school and waltz into tests as if he never deigned to do anything so dreary as study. “Reading a lot, being smart, showing an interest in what teachers said — those were considered girl things.” “Source Code” highlights all the women who played a formative role in Gates’s coming of age — his mother, his Gami, his elementary-school teachers, the beloved librarian. But when he gets to computers, the book describes a man’s world.
Throughout “Source Code,” Gates slips in glancing references to his habit of rocking in place “anytime I got to really thinking about something.” In an epilogue, he speculates that if he were growing up today, he would probably be identified as someone on the autism spectrum.
“For most of my life, I’ve been focused on what’s ahead,” Gates writes in his last paragraph. “As I grow older, though, I find myself looking back more and more.” It’s the kind of valedictory ending one would expect from a politician’s memoir: wistful, inoffensive and completely banal. He says that he still feels like a “kid alert and wanting to make sense of it all.” Given that the memoir stops at a date 45 years in the past, we’re left waiting for the grown-up Gates to make sense of it all, too.
SOURCE CODE: My Beginnings | By Bill Gates | Knopf | 318 pp. | $30