Source Code

The author was a small, skinny kid with a squeaky voice.  He found it hard to relate to other kids, and felt more comfortable with adults.  He didn't seem to be really bullied, but was simply ignored by his classmates.  He, in turn, tended to ignore them, aside from a close group of friends with whom he went on long mountain backpacking trips, when as young as 13, without adult supervision.

He had a close relationship with a loving family, a family of high achievers who were concerned by their son's somewhat isolated behavior, but who gave him a large degree of freedom.  He developed interests that other kids simply didn't have, and he delved deeply into them.  

By fifth or sixth grade, he realized that he could attract interest and a certain degree of acceptance from his peers by becoming the class clown.

Gosh, I thought.  He sounds a bit like me when I was  his age.  But this lad was Bill Gates, who became the co-founder of Microsoft together with his high school friend Paul Allen.  I'm afraid the resemblance between his life and mine diverged at a fairly early stage, but the early resemblance was enough to keep me turning the pages avidly.

In his autobiography, Source Code: My Beginnings, Bill describes his life in colorful detail from the time he was an infant growing up in Seattle, through his grade school years at View Ridge and Laurelhurst elementary schools, and then -- from seventh grade on -- at Seattle's prestigious Lakeside School.  Looking back, it's easy to conclude that his experiences at Lakeside had a greater impact on his future life -- both professionally and personally -- than did his undergraduate years at Harvard.

His brilliance, especially but not exclusively in math, was evidenced early on.  As was his ability to focus exhaustively on one subject at a time.  In elementary school:

I got interested in penguins and could have told you how long an Adelle can hold its breath underwater (six minutes) or how tall an Emperor can grow (4.3 feet).  For a while rockets and bridges captivated me.

In fifth grade, the teacher asked each student to pick a state to profile.  Others picked California or Florida or Hawaii.  For some reason, Bill picked Delaware.

I inhaled everything I could find on Delaware.  I trolled the stacks at the library, dug out Delaware: A Guide to the First State, and books on Delaware's history, the state's role in the Underground Railroad.  I wrote to the state of Delaware for brochures on tourism and history.

He studied the Indian history of the state and wrote "fictitious accounts of the lives of a Delawarean oyster fisherman and a granite miner."  He analyzed in some detail the DuPont company, Delaware's largest corporation -- including a description of the chemistry of polymerization.

By the time I was done, I had generated 177 pages on little Delaware. ... The class jester wasn't expected to turn in a tome. ... My teacher loved it.

I loved reading about it.  This was the sort of a intellectual triumph I would have loved to have generated as a fifth grader, presenting it proudly to the teacher in front of the entire class.  But who does that in fifth grade?

Well, Bill Gates did.

When he was a sophomore at Lakeside, the school acquired a teletype machine allowing its employees and students to use, through a telephone connection, purchased time on a mainframe computer in California.  Shortly before this, he had met the guy who became his best friend (but who died tragically in a climbing accident two years later) -- a boy as intelligent and as intense as Bill.  Both of them were fascinated by the use of computers, and he made other Lakeside friends, including the slightly older Paul Allen, who shared his interests.  Soon, computing consumed his consciousness.  Luckily, Lakeside is the kind of school where teachers aren't threatened by a student's brilliance, but go out of their way to encourage them., even remaining very flexible about class attendance.  Bill's budding abilities at coding -- and really, at that point, almost everyone's ability at coding was somewhat rudimentary -- enabled him, while still a sophomore, to do free lance consulting work for a couple of local companies.  

One of those companies was located on Roosevelt, in the U-District adjacent to the University of Washington.  Bill was soon sneaking out of his bedroom window at night , taking a bus into the U-District, and working all night long on coding -- arriving home in time for a couple of hours sleep before going to school.

The last 75 percent of the book takes Bill from Lakeside, and to Harvard -- where he dropped out -- to his and Alllen's founding of a small software business called Micro-Soft.  The rest is history, and the book presents that history up until Bill Gates was about 40 years old.  A sequel is expected.

To me, as can be gleaned from the above, Bill's early life was the most fascinating part of the book, especially because he is very open about his probably falling somewhere on the autism scale (but never formally diagnosed, I gather), and because the locale was here in Seattle.  But his post-university years, although dealing with technical computer coding problems and creation of a business, is clearly and entertainingly presented.  It was even easy for a non-computer buff like myself to follow.