Source Code describes with unprecedented candour Bill Gates’ life from his childhood in Seattle to dropping out of Harvard aged 20 in 1975. Shortly afterwards he wrote, with Paul Allen, the programme which became the foundation of Microsoft and eventually for the entire software industry, changing the way the world works and lives.
Gates writes about the centrality of family to his life – his encouraging grandmother and ambitious parents, about struggles to fit in, his rebelliousness, and the impact on him of the death of his closest friend. We see his extraordinary mind developing as a teenager, his excitement about the rapidly emerging technology of computing, and the earliest signs of his phenomenal business acumen.
Source Code is a warm, wise and revealing self-portrait of one of the most influential people of our age.
Review
Refreshingly frank ... Bill Gates is John McEnroe of the tech world. In the first of what the author threatens will be a trilogy of memoirs, [he] recounts the first two decades of his life, from his birth in 1955 to the founding of Microsoft and its agreement to supply a version of the Basic programming language to Apple Computer in 1977. There is a genuine gratitude for influential mentors, and a wry mood of self-deprecation throughout ... a sense of the writer, older and wiser, trying to redeem the past through understanding it better -- Steven Poole ― Guardian
A highly readable account of his early life up to the creation of Microsoft, Source Code is unusually personal and laced with self-awareness. [Gates] doesn’t hold back from admitting his own shortcomings [and] delivers a fast-paced account of the rise from programming prodigy to budding tech mogul, replete with cliffhanger moments and revealing new details. Through all of this, he looks back with detachment on the competitive intensity and intellectual ferocity that characterised his rise to the top -- Richard Waters ― Financial Times
Charmingly told ... Source Code isn’t so much a book about the early days of computing software as a lament to a bygone America: it’s as filled with nostalgia as Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie or Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. It immerses us fully in how it felt to be a middle-class child in the 1960s Seattle suburbs, and what it was like, a decade later, to be at the forefront of a small but world-altering technical revolution. -- Tom Knowles ― Telegraph
A gentle, pensive autobiography ... The pleasure of this reflective book is the sense of Old Bill Gates peeking over your shoulder, as bemused by Young Bill Gates as you are. -- Alexander Masters ― Daily Mail
Bill Gates’s career has been defined by his ability to peer into the future. In Source Code, he meditate[s] on his past. Touching ... [its] brief humanising moments are the closest we get to learning more about the man behind the businessman. -- Rhiannon Williams ― i Paper
Very much a book about Gates’s beginnings ... frank, self-deprecating ... a book for the real Gates aficionados -- Times ― Tom Whipple
Bill Gates is a technologist, business leader, and philanthropist. In 1975, he co-founded Microsoft with his childhood friend Paul Allen and today he is chair of the Gates Foundation. Bill is the founder of Breakthrough Energy, an effort to commercialize clean energy and other climate-related technologies, and TerraPower, a company investing in developing groundbreaking nuclear technologies. He has three children.
