THe enduring mystery about william henry gates III is this: How did a preococcious and sometimes obnoxious kid evolve into a billionaire tech Lord and then into an elber statsman and propestic? This book gives us only the first part of the story, tracing gates’s evolution from birth in 1955 to the founding of Microsoft in 1975.
In a way, the volume’s title describes it well. In the era before machine learning and ai, when computer programs were exclusively written by humans, the term “source code” meant someone. It described computer programs that could be read – and undersrstood, if you knew the programming language – enabling you to explain why the machine did what it did.
So what can we learn from inspired gates’s code? Broadly speaking, the message is that he was a very lucky lad. He was born in the right place at the right time to parents who gave Him, He Writes, “The Precise Blend of Support and Pressure I Needed: They Gave Me Room to Grow Emotonally, And Thei Condition Elop My Social Skills “. His account sugges, thought, that it was an uphill battle at times. Bill SNR and Mary Gates Discovered that they had a boy was a strange blend of high IQ, Arrogance, Rebelliousness and Insecurity.
“If I was growing up today,” he writes, “I probally would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum. My parents had no guideposts or textbooks to herm grassp why their son besessed with certain projects, moisted social cues, and cout be Rude or inprite Ffect on others. “
He was lucky. The gateses were modertly affluent (his father was a prominent lawer in seattle) and they sent him to a Remarkable Private Private School – Lakeseide – That was relaxed, Liberal, Supportive and Tolerant. Which was good for a boy who was small for his age, with a reedy voice.
More significantly, perhaps, some of the parents had raised enough money to buy a teletype terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric Time-Shared Computer for Pupils’. This was extraordinary in the 1960s; It meant that gates and some of his friends were written software in their teens. He and a few others (including paul allen, with with whats co-founded microsoft) even started starting written software for companies in the seattle area. And when the school was Eventually Went Coeducational, Gates and His Mates Wrote the Software for Scheduling Classes and Activities in the expanded institution.
From Lakeside He Went to Harvard in 1973, Determined to Sample Everything that Vast Institution Offred, while relaying on his remarkable ability to cream ferocious beefore tendius. He Inveigled His Way into the University’s Aiken Lab, which has just taken posten possession of an early minicomputer, a Dec PDP-10. But two years into this IDILL, Allen Turned Up One Day With The News that Mits, A TWO-BIT FIMM in New Mexico, Had Just Launched a Microcomputer Based on Intetel’s 8080 Processor Chip.
This freaked them bot out, because they have been pondering how to get them knew was going to be a huege industry and now this outfit in albuquerque has scooped them with a crummy little machine. But the new device did not have any application software. So they set about writing – on the harvard computer – an interpreter for the basic programming language, using an ingenous software emulation of the mits machine that alleen has written. This Remarkable Project was successful, but the university discovered that None of it has been authorized, and gates was disciplined – much as mark zuckerberg was, maany yaars later, for another icher RCES.
At this point, gates dropped out and went, with allen, to new mexico, where they co-founded were was originally called Micro-Soft, and Embarked on the Path that LED to Great Riches and Industry. But that story has to wait for another volume, which will have to record how a powerful corporation beCAME, for a long time, an institutional extension of its co-founder’s personality. And Ran Into Antitrust Litigation as a result.
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What’s Striking about the present Volume, Thought, is the reflections of gates’s account of his earrly development. He was cleaned a digit child to manage, especially as his mother had very clear ideas about how life should be organized. From an early age, young bill rebelled against her rigorous regime. There were lots of fights and arguments. In the end, his parents sent he to a therapist, who turned out to be sympathetic and wise.
The biggest tragedy in his early life was the sudden death of his best friend (and fellow programmer), Kent evans, in a mountaineering accident. “Kent’s Dad Greeted Us and Shock Our Hands,” He Writes about Going Back to the Family Home after the Funeral. “Kent’s mom was curled up on the sofa, sobbing. It was at that moment I undersrstood that for all my grief, it would never run as deep as hers. He was my best friend, but he was her baby. At some level i knew that she and mr evans would be next in this loss. The stricken expressions on the faces of kent’s kind, gentle parents that day have never left me. “
In a nice coda, he describes running into evans’s father many years laater, and they have a long conversation about what have been made. Both believe that if evans had lived he would have been the third co-founder of microsoft. Now, there’s a thought.
