Paul Tuns
Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates (Knopf, $37.95, 318 pages)
To many on the Right, Bill Gates is a villain, a personification of the World Economic Forum Man. To social conservatives, he is another billionaire using his wealth to promote left-wing social causes including depopulation in the developing world. To some on the Left, he’s just another baneful plutocrat. However one views the founder of Microsoft, he is a fascinating figure in business and society, and his origin story is worth understanding.
William Henry Gates III has written the first of what he promises to be a multivolume memoir, the cleverly titled Source Code explaining how a kid from an admittedly privileged background became one of the world’s wealthiest and most influential people.
Gates limits his first memoir to his roughly his first two decades, focusing on family life and school. Born in 1955, Gates was fortunate – he will admit he is lucky – to be born into a well-to-do family of a Seattle lawyer and his schoolteacher wife. He is precocious, sometimes obnoxious, but almost always a keen observer of the world around him. At the age of eight, he picks up on the fact that his grandmother’s gin rummy and sevens games are essentially systems of dynamic data. Learning to master that data would give a player an enormous advantage. (Today, he plays bridge online.)
He would often talk back to adults, bother other students, and seldom applied himself in school, at least until he gained access to a Teletype computer terminal under one of his great influences, his math teacher Bill Dougall. Disappointingly, Gates calls him an important influence but has a mere paragraph about this teacher; it is the computer terminal that matters most to Gates.
Had the Gates family not sent young Bill to Lakeside, an elite private school, he may never have fallen in love with computers and their applications. Few schools in 1968 had access to computers. Nor would he have met his and befriended Paul Allen, with whom he would later found Microsoft, the software giant. Together, the two studied programming manuals like they are baseball box scores.
In another case of being at the right place at the right time, Gates went to Harvard at just as the school’s Aiken lab acquired an early microcomputer, the DEC PDP-10. Gates noodled around with it, writing code seemingly for fun.
Although they went to different universities – Gates went to Harvard hoping to become a mathematician – Allen, after leaving Washington State, would later convince his friend to drop out of school to found Micro-Soft after the pair had some success writing programming for other companies including a start-up minicomputer outfit calls MITS. Gates and Allen had hoped to start a microcomputer company but pivoted to programing.
Gates was upset that users of their Basic program were not paying for it; he would accuse them of “stealing software” and wrote an open letter against the “open source” libertarianism of the tech world, as it existed in the mid-1970s.
And that is roughly where the story ends. Future memoirs will presumably detail the development of Microsoft’s most famous programs and how they changed business and home computing, and the clash of personalities and impending lawsuits that marked the company’s rise, to say nothing of Gates moving within elite circles and pushing a very specific philanthropic model.
The first memoir explains how an arrogant, awkward, but highly intelligent kid was able to make good on the “unearned privilege” that he enjoyed. He is nothing if not keenly aware of his advantages, “mostly out of my control,” and he acknowledges his gratitude to those who helped him. Chief among those are his parents, who, he says, gave him “the precise blend of support and pressure I needed.” He writes of his father, that he “would use the word ‘organized’ in a way that meant a person had things under control,” and as he built Micro-Soft, he wanted to prove to not just the world, but especially his parents, that he was organized, that he had things under control. In a chapter titled “Lucky Kid,” Gates recalls visiting his father’s tenth-floor law office and how those visits would leave an indelible mark, creating “a mental model of work life for me and set the metrics by which I could come to measure accomplishments.”
Gates writes, “If I were growing up today, I probably would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum,” as he “became so obsessed with certain projects, missed social cues, and could be rude or inappropriate without seeming to notice his effect on others.” Maybe his dedication to organization and control has less to do with his father’s expectations than his undiagnosed autism. Regardless, the fact that autism was seldom diagnosed in the ‘60s probably ensured that certain doors were left open to young Bill Gates that might otherwise have been closed. Lucky Kid indeed.
If Gates applies the same self-reflective and sometimes self-deprecating writing to the next two volumes of his memoirs as he did is Source Code, readers will be in for a treat to learn what drives one of the world’s most famous businessmen to succeed.
