Geek speak

Some books are better unread. Some books are better unwritten. Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates is just such a book. You wouldn’t be at all drawn to this book unless you knew the success he had launching Microsoft.
Or maybe you’re attracted to the photo of a seven-year-old with a front tooth missing which is what’s on the cover. It wasn’t the photo that drew me, it was the Gates name and the fact that it was billed as an autobiography.
Biographies and autobiographies are my favourite genre and my shelves are lined with others including the likes of Robert Caro’s multi-volume work on Lyndon Johnson, Max Beaverbrook by Charles Williams, and Hilary Brown’s War Tourist.
Growing up in the northwestern U.S. Gates had the usual early boyhood: school and scuffles. But there was something unusual. For this book he was somehow able to remember and include numerous full-length conversations with his 12-year-old friends as if he’d typed up notes each night and kept every page.
I don’t know about you, but I barely remember being 12 let alone what drivel was tossed around on the playground.
Source Code, the title, as I understand it, describes how you could read a computer program. In Gates’s case, he understood what he was reading and set out to train his brain.
But his words failed to train my brain as he teaches himself BASIC, a computer language. His father and his grandmother see merit in what he’s doing and don’t fret about him missing regular school. What a world!
But, from that point on you have to be a geek to care about what he’s doing. He was somehow able to see computer code in his mind and take it to the next level. Because he rarely attended school he’d stop coding and the hit the textbooks for a few hours before exams. Teachers were lenient but that wasn’t all; he did well despite his sporadic attention.
If the first half of the book is barely interesting, the second half is baffling – all coding talk.
But he got into Harvard and then at twenty in 1975 dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft with Paul Allen. Today Gates is revered and worth US$106 billion. How he did it is beyond me and beyond his telling.
This is supposed to be the first of three volumes by Gates. I won’t be reading the rest.