Pete's Reviews > Source Code: My Beginnings

Source Code : My Beginnings (2025) by Bill Gates is an autobiographical account of Gates’ life up until Microsoft moved to Seattle.

The question of what makes someone able to create a trillion dollar company is interesting. Source Code has Gates write about his own youth. He is fully aware of how privileged his is and writes “It’s impossible to overstate the unearned privilege I enjoyed. To be born in the rich United States is a big part of of a winning birth lottery ticket, as is being born white and male”. The Gates family was also rich within the US as well. But there are millions of people with similar privilege and barely any found similar companies.

Gates grew up the son of lawyer, Bill Gates the second and his wife Mary Gates. His mother’s family were Christian Scientists. His father’s father owned a furniture store in Bremerton near Seattle. Both were clearly very bright. Gates’ father was a successful lawyer in Seattle. Mary was clearly very smart and after being on a number of charity boards also joined various large corporate boards.

Bill was a happy young kid and the family did a lot including going to summer camps with other families. His elder sister Kristi immediately did well in school but Bill didn’t. But he did do well in maths. Today Gates would have been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum.

After the family moved he didn’t settle to well into a new school so his parents sent him to Lakeside Academy. This is a fancy private school that now charges more than forty thousand dollars a year for students. There Bill initially did poorly but soon picked up and did well. The school also gave him access to computers, something which was very rare at the time. Gates met Kent Evans, Ric Weiland and Paul Allen there. He also got really into hiking and did long hikes with the scouts.

Gates, Evans, Allen and Weiland all worked incredibly hard to learn programming. They taught themselves so much that there were able to sell their skills and make software in exchange for computing time and for money. Gates would sneak out of his parents house and work nights on his code. Gate’s worth ethic throughout the book is really remarkable.

Evans seems to have been Bill’s best friend. Evans took up mountain climbing and had a fatal accident. This must have been a truly shocking event for Gates.

Gates finished school extremely strongly and got a perfect score on the math SAT and got into Harvard. It’s well known that Gates dropped out of Harvard, but he did spend years there and managed to take and pass the extremely hard Math 55 course. While taking that course Gates realised that while he was very good at math there were people who were considerably better and he’d be unlikely to have a great future in math. Jeff Bezos had a similar experience at Princeton. Gates instead decided to work on his coding and look into business. Gates also met Steve Balmer there.

Gates’ friend from Lakeside Paul Allen was a few years older than Gates and already had a job coding. But he and Gates still wanted to work together and Allen came over to Boston so the two could work on various projects. Allen was aware that microprocessors were coming and believed it would be a huge deal when they did. The Intel 8080 arrived and MITS computers produced the Altair. Allen wrote an emulator for the machine and Gates wrote a BASIC interpreter using that. They then licenced that to MITS and together formed a company – Microsoft.

Microsoft was initially based in Albuquerque where MITS was. There Allen worked and Gates soon joined him. The company made enough money to start employing people and wrote BASIC for various other machines including Apple. When the company was getting more established they then moved it to Seattle which is where the book ends.

Source Code is an interesting book and does provide some insight into what makes Gates tick. He was very bright and on the spectrum. He had rich, hard working parents who had a vibrant social life and made sure Gates was part of that. He also hiked and became independent at a young age. Gates would work incredibly hard on his passions. He was also just the right age to ride the wave of the personal computer.