BOOK- SOURCE CODE: MY BEGINNINGS
AUTHOR: Bill Gates
PUBLISHED BY: Allen Lane
PRICE: Rs 1,499
“He built the first software company before anybody really in our industry knew what a software company was. That was huge.” Apple’s co-founder, the late Steve Jobs, meant every word when he met Bill Gates for a joint interview at D5 in 2007.
Source Code, the first volume of a planned trilogy from Gates, recollects the heyday of computer programming. The memoir is also the story of a middle-class, socially-awkward kid who became an inspiration for coders.
Growing up in Seattle with a lawyer father and a schoolteacher mother, Gates’s early days in school were not exactly scrapbook-worthy. He performed badly enough and a speech counsellor suggested he be held back for a year but his parents didn’t take her advice.
“If I were growing up today, I probably would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum. During my childhood, the fact that some people’s brains process information differently from others wasn’t widely understood,” writes Gates.
His mother’s approach to life was methodical. Before Christmas, she would “read her notes from the previous year’s holiday to review what went wrong last year and improve upon it”. Gates writes how the family “lived by the structure of routines, traditions, and rules my mother established”. Later, the idea of micro-managing became a part of his routine at Microsoft.
William Henry Gates III was unlike his older sister, who easily mingled with other children. Most of his time was dedicated to solving puzzles and reading, something his “parents never questioned spending money on”. One of his greatest treasures was a 1962 set of World Book Encyclopedia. Ultimately, he found himself at home when he discovered the joys of mathematics: “Now I had growing confidence in the power of my own intellect.”
Life was set to get exciting as well. He was enrolled at the Seattle prep school, Lakeside. His life changed with the arrival of a computer terminal. “This was the fall of 1968, the close of a year that would be remembered as one of the most tumultuous in American history. The span of just a few months brought the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert F. Kennedy and the televised beatings of protestors at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and riots of Baltimore to Boston.” It was also the time he heard a “chug-chug-chug” sound at school — a teletype machine that could connect to a computer to play games and “even write our own computer programmes”. The Lakeside computer room became a “mosh pit” that included a boy named Paul Allen with whom Gates would ultimately form Micro-Soft (the hyphen was later dropped). Source Code ends in 1978, just as Gates moved Microsoft
from its first headquarters in Albuquerque, New Mexico, back to his hometown of Seattle.
There is the feeling that Gates’s life could be condensed to two volumes; the chapters filled with “6800 BASIC” and “8080 APL” may overwhelm the common reader as well. At the same time, it must be said that the subsequent volumes hold the promise of dealing with Steve Jobs and his meeting with Melinda Gates. These volumes would also be difficult to write because of the many actions he has to defend.
But Source Code does its job: it imparts a lesson in not giving up on your dreams.