Shortly before Bill Gates’s seventh birthday in 1962, his parents stuffed their son into a button-down shirt and blazer for a visit to Century 21, a bold showcase of scientific prowess in their home town of Seattle. This futuristic fair was intended as the nation’s rebuff to Soviet Russia following the Sputnik satellite launch, which sparked the space race. The family enjoyed the new 600ft Space Needle. They also saw the Mercury capsule that carried the first American into space; Ford’s concept of a six-wheeled nuclear-powered car; and IBM’s idea of a cheap computer, costing $100,000. Best of all in the boy’s view was rattling around on the Wild Mouse Ride, which felt risky and thrilling, stoking a lifelong love of rollercoasters.
More than six decades later, the technology titan reflects that the Hollywood version of his life story would say how he fell in love with computers at that moment in the IBM Pavilion – as was the case with Paul Allen, another geeky local kid who became Gates’s friend and future partner at Microsoft. Although there was no such Damascene moment for him, Gates admits that the fair’s ‘techno-optimism’ must have affected him:
At that impressionable age, the message in 1962 was so clear: we would explore space, stop disease, travel faster and easier. Technology was progress and, in the right hands, it would bring peace.
That nugget from his autobiography underlines how the determined, nerdy and wilful boy was fortunate to grow up at such a time and place. Gates came of age as computers started to surge in power and crash in price, reshaping society and making him the world’s richest person for more than two decades. Source Code details his suburban childhood in Seattle, his discovery of coding and how he built the foundations of a software firm that has played such a pivotal role in our world. Never short of confidence or ego, the multibillionaire is splitting his life story into three parts. Subsequent volumes will describe Microsoft’s growth into a global technology behemoth and his philanthropy. But I suspect they will be less interesting than this candid insight into his background.
He was nicknamed ‘Trey’ at home, the card player’s lingo for ‘three’, since his father and grandfather shared the same name. Playing cards from a young age with his grandmother honed the competitive streak that was to become so apparent in his ruthless business career. His father was a hard-working lawyer, a gentle giant who stood 6ft 7in tall, while his mother, Mary, the daughter of a wealthy banker, seemed ferociously driven and organised. She set the household clocks eight minutes fast to guarantee punctuality and wrote notes after each Christmas to ensure she could make improvements on their celebrations the following year.
Gates’s parents, baffled by their son’s angry confrontations, sent him to a therapist
Mary was ambitious for her three children. ‘She envisioned kids who excelled in school and sports, were socially active and pursued everything they did fully and completely,’ writes Gates. But her middle child was atypical. Bill was a bright boy who loved to read and soak up facts, while excelling at maths. He was full of energy, but easily bored at school, his mind often wandering in class. He struggled to fit in with other children, while interrupting teachers, missing social cues and sometimes being rude, with obsessive behaviour and outbursts. ‘If I was growing up today, I probably would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum,’ he writes in the epilogue. But in those days, the fact that some people’s brains process information differently was not fully understood. The term ‘neurodivergent’ was not even coined until shortly before the turn of the century.
Gates’s achievement in building one of the world’s most influential firms underlines the importance for society to embrace autistic citizens, starting in schools that so often struggle to cope with neurodiversity. In one revealing anecdote, Gates tells how as an eight-year-old scout he was set a fund-raising challenge to sell nuts. He became so focused on the task that he shifted 179lb of them in 11 days. When given a project to profile the state of Delaware, he turned in to his unfortunate teacher 177 pages on its economy, history and tourist spots, inside a cover he’d carved from wood:
It was in every way a dream assignment. In the privacy of my room, away from the judging eyes of other kids, I could do what I liked the most: read, collect facts and synthesise information.
Gates found solace working in a library, helping to catalogue the books. His parents, baffled by his angry confrontations and battling to engage him in their suburban lifestyle, sent him to see a therapist. ‘I’m at war with my parents,’ said the boy. They switched him to a private school, where other pupils later said they saw him as an obnoxious loner. He pretended not to care – although he admits now he did not know how to fit in and was searching desperately for an identity. Instead of letting him turn inwards, however, his parents pushed him to try new things, feeding his curiosity about the world.
Then he befriended another obsessive teenager called Kent Evans – who died tragically young in a climbing accident – and they discovered computers. Gates loved coding, which suited his mindset. He saw quickly how this fast evolving technology was going to change the world, then realised there would be a huge demand for high-quality software as personal computers fell in price and became ubiquitous.
His business career began as a 16-year-old at school, writing programs for the teaching schedule with his 19-year-old hippie pal Allen. They worked obsessively, falling asleep over their terminals. Gates displayed the same single-mindedness at Harvard, almost getting thrown out for abusing access to university systems with friends to win a contract. We catch glimpses of the ruthless side to his character that led Microsoft to become notorious for sharp elbows and tax avoidance, forcing Allen to accept a split that handed Gates 64 per cent ownership. ‘I feel bad now that I pushed him,’ he says, although with the caveat that this reflected their commitment to the firm. Certainly it made him obscenely rich. And now this surprisingly readable book shows the basics that helped form one of the key figures of our digital age.
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