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Bill Gates speaks with GeekWire about his book, Source Code: My Beginnings. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)
Never go to the dentist the morning after an LSD trip. That’s one of the more unexpected takeaways from Bill Gates’ new memoir, Source Code: My Beginnings.
“I vowed that if I ever dropped acid again, I wouldn’t do it solo and I wouldn’t do it when I had plans for the next day, especially a dental procedure,” he writes of his ill-timed decision to heed the advice of Paul Allen, his Jimi Hendrix-loving friend and future Microsoft co-founder, to become “experienced” in the ways of psychedelics.
The first in a planned trilogy of books about his life, Source Code covers Gates’ remarkable childhood in Seattle, his brief stint at Harvard, and the early years of “Micro-soft” in Albuquerque — back when the company was so broke that it had to borrow $7,000 from a new employee.
It ends in a cliffhanger in 1979, just before Gates and Allen return home with their rag-tag crew of programmers, bringing MS-DOS, BASIC, and a fledgling PC software startup with them.
This is not the behind-the-scenes story of today’s multi-trillion-dollar tech giant. It’s not a tell-all about the past few years of Gates’ life. But reading this book feels like watching someone take a well-known black-and-white sketch, fill in the details, and paint it in vivid color.
It’s revealing enough to make a reader hope Gates will be able to keep it up in the next two books.
“One luxury of hyper-success should be that you’re willing to admit your shortcomings.” he said in an interview with GeekWire about the book.
Source Code has plenty of those admissions. But more than a personal history, it’s an entrepreneurial story that feels newly relevant today. Allen and Gates found their niche in software and tied their fate to the PC in much the same way as OpenAI and others are now capitalizing on the rise of artificial intelligence to build 21st Century tech giants.
Fifty years ago, as Gates describes it, computing was becoming effectively free — making the transition from time-shared luxury to technical commodity. That opened the door to the most popular applications of the day, like word processing, email, and spreadsheets.
“Now, what’s happening is intelligence is becoming free,” Gates said in the interview. “And that’s even more profound than computing becoming free.”
For Gates and Allen, the spark of Microsoft was seeing the Altair 8080 on the cover of Popular Electronics magazine, and their concern that the PC revolution was happening without them. But as Gates details in this book, they and their friends had been gathering the kindling for years, as budding entrepreneurs doing business as Lakeside Programming Group.
The familiar anecdotes from past biographies — such as Allen writing the bootstrap loader for the Altair 8080 BASIC on the plane to Albuquerque — carry more punch in Gates’ retelling.
“Oh my God, it printed four!” yelled Ed Roberts, the president of Altair maker MITS, when the software miraculously worked, as Gates remembers Allen telling him over a celebratory dinner.
Paul Allen, foreground, using a teletype machine with Bill Gates at Lakeside School, from the 1969-70 Lakeside yearbook. (Photo courtesy Lakeside School.)
The book is a quintessential story of the Pacific Northwest. During a grueling winter hike in the Olympic Mountains his junior year, Gates kept his mind off the cold by optimizing code in his head — mentally debugging a BASIC expression evaluator as he trudged through the snow.
It’s a story of friendship and tragedy. Gates writes about his deep connection to his best friend, Kent Evans, who fueled Gates’ early fascination with business, economics, and history. Known for pushing his own limits, he died in a mountain-climbing accident at the age of 17.
They seemed destined to work together as adults. It’s difficult not to wonder what Microsoft — or whatever they’d have created — would have been with Bill and Kent as a founding duo.
“He was by far my closest friend,” Gates said, describing the bond between them and two older students, Allen and Ric Weiland, who would become one of Microsoft’s first employees. “Kent was the one I was talking to every night and brainstorming about things.”
The closing chapters of the book start to feel like history unfolding.
Gates recalls, for example, his 1977 trip to the first West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco, when he noticed a guy “with long black hair, a tightly cropped beard, and a three-piece suit” a few booths away, with a crowd of people around him.
As Gates tells the story, “Even from a distance I could tell he had a certain aura about him. I said to myself, ‘Who is that guy?’ That was the day I met Steve Jobs.”
The book is a glimpse inside the mind of a young Bill Gates — a brilliant, driven, and knowledge-hungry kid who thought and did things differently. At one point, he secretly spent his parents’ money on two sets of textbooks, one for home and one for school, so that it would seem like he didn’t study or care, when in fact he was excelling academically.
But at its core, it’s a tribute to the people around him: friends, teachers, his sisters Kristi and Libby, and his late parents, Bill Gates Sr. and Mary Gates, whose portrayal by their son made me want to be a better parent. (Then again, if my teenager were sneaking out at night to take a bus to a computer lab, I’d like to think I’d notice. But Seattle and the world were different then.)
He was, in fact, a “lucky kid,” as his childhood therapist told him.
Gates remembers his mom and dad as wise, measured, caring, principled, and deeply community-oriented. And they come off like saints for putting up with his defiance, with the notable exception of the time his dad dumped a glass of water in his face at the dinner table.
“Thanks for the shower,” Gates shot back. After that, he writes, “I slowly put down my fork, stood up, and walked downstairs to my room. I had never seen my gentle father lose his temper. To see how I had pushed my dad to that extreme was a shock.”
He was, as he puts it, a “complicated son.”
Gates writes in the epilogue, “If I were growing up today, I’m sure that I would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum. In the time of my childhood, the fact that some people’s brains process information differently from others wasn’t widely understood.”
He expresses sympathy for his parents, who “had no guideposts or textbooks to help them grasp why their son became so obsessed with certain projects … missed social cues, and could be rude and inappropriate without seeming to notice his effect on others.”
Bill Gates, foreground, with his parents, Bill and Mary Gates, younger sister Libby, and older sister Kristi. (Photo courtesy Gates family)
Gates told GeekWire that he hoped sharing this part of his personal story would help others. “I do think it’s valuable for anybody who’s different to see that I was able to take that and make it a strength,” he said.
The book is, by definition, told from Gates’ perspective, with all the natural limitations of a memoir. But it also has the feel of a well-reported biography, which is no coincidence.
Former Wall Street Journal reporter Rob Guth, who now works for Gates, has spent years doing the legwork — going so far as to dig up Gates’ Lakeside transcript to fact-check his memory, which turned out to be wrong. (In fact, he got a mix of A’s and B’s in ninth grade, not straight A’s.)
This deep research also strengthens the narrative. At the end of his first year at Lakeside, for example, when Gates was starting to wonder if he belonged, there was something happening behind the scenes, unbeknownst to him, that would come to define his life.
“[I]f I’d been paying attention to the final issue of the Lakeside newspaper that spring, I would have noticed a two-paragraph story at the bottom of the second page,” he writes. “It said that starting in the fall, the math department was going to get connected to a computer. ‘Hopefully some students will use it to work on extensive projects,’ the story mused.”
No one could have imagined how extensive those projects would become.
Now approaching 70 years old, it may have been convenient for Gates to focus on his childhood for now, leaving the thornier stories of Microsoft and his later life to future memoirs. But he’s set a high bar with this one in the meantime.
Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates, published by Knopf, is out Feb. 4.
