Source Code: My Beginnings

by Bill Gates

I enjoyed the mental wrestling, as well as the deeply satisfying feeling you get from learning a new skill. Card playing taught me that no matter how complex or even mysterious something seems, you often can figure it out. The world can be understood.

I channeled the same intensity that drew me into solving the puzzle of Gami’s card skill into anything that interested me—and nothing that didn’t. The things that interested me included reading, math, and being alone in my own head. The things that didn’t were the daily rituals of life and school, handwriting, art, and sports. Also, mostly everything my mother told me to do.

At that impressionable age, the message in 1962 was so clear: We would explore space, stop disease, travel faster and easier. Technology was progress and, in the right hands, it would bring peace. My family watched Kennedy give his “we choose to go to the moon” speech that fall, all of us gathered around the television as the president told America that we needed to harness the best of our energies and skills for a bold future. Days later we watched the debut of The Jetsons, offering the cartoon version of that future, with flying cars and robot dogs. From Walter Cronkite and Life we were treated to a steady flow of new wonders: the first laser, first cassette tape, first factory robot, and first silicon chip. You couldn’t be a kid back then and not feel the excitement of this.

Don’t goof off. Excel. Don’t let us down. They also subscribed to a rewards system: the going rate for an A was a quarter; all As earned you dinner at the restaurant of your choice, which was usually six hundred feet in the air at the Eye of the Needle, the spinning dining room at the top of the shiny new Space Needle.

My parents’ friends were the same way. These weren’t people who felt a longing to leave their hometown for more exciting lives in New York or Los Angeles. They graduated from the University of Washington with degrees in law, engineering, and business, then settled down within miles of their alma mater and their old friends. They had kids, set up businesses, joined firms, ran for office, and spent their free time on their own versions of the school levy and YMCA board.

My perception of adults’ limitations undermined the family compact. If I could think for myself, I reasoned, why would I need my parents’ input? Maybe I didn’t even need them. I started to question the whole parent-child enterprise. Why did they get to call the shots? Who were they to say when I had to go to bed or what to eat or how to keep my room? Why should I have to do things that didn’t matter to me? Never mind that my mom and dad provided everything I had or ever needed, from the material to the emotional; I just didn’t get why they were in charge. Their power seemed arbitrary.

Try something; see if it works. If it doesn’t, try again with something different. The computer worked a bit like a slot machine that sucks you in by giving little payouts at random intervals. Instead of coins, the computer kept me going by affirming that sections of my programs could work.

The gap between B+ and A was the difference between being the top person in the class and being a fake. My severe take was that everyone in that class was the best person they knew in math—up to that point. All of us had 800s on our math SAT. All of us entered college thinking we would be the best. And when we weren’t, well, we’d been victims of self-deception, we were frauds in my book. My inability to do better in that class forced me to reconsider how I thought of myself. I so deeply identified with being the smartest, the best. That status was a shield behind which I hid my insecurities. Up until then, I had experienced only a few situations in which I felt someone was hands-down better than I was in some intellectual endeavor that mattered to me, and in those cases I soaked up what they could teach me. This time was different. I was recognizing that while I had an excellent math brain, I didn’t have the gift of insight that sets apart the best mathematicians. I had talent but not the ability to make fundamental discoveries. I saw a vision of myself in ten years: teaching in a university but not good enough to do groundbreaking work.

The Harvard experience

Within a few months we would learn that despite the proclamations in that first magazine story, the Altair at that point was just a clunky prototype, a single machine that wasn’t even finished. Such was the dawn of the personal computer revolution. We all were just faking our way along. —

One thing we needed was a name for our partnership. Up to that point Paul and I had been calling ourselves Traf-O-Data and using the company’s stationery every time we sent a business letter. But we wanted to separate the work on traffic from whatever new business we did with microcomputers. “Allen & Gates Consulting” made logical sense, but I thought people would mistake us for lawyers. It also sounded kind of small and artisanal, whereas we wanted a name with more gravitas, like our model, Digital Equipment Corp. That name carried the weight of a behemoth. With a name like that, people might take us seriously, which still seemed like an ambitious goal for two young guys figuring it out as we went along. It was Paul who had the next thought: Since we were writing software for microcomputers, how about combining those two words? I agreed. We had our name: Micro-Soft.

In notes I recently found in my Harvard records, he wrote, “He [me] did not understand the ramifications of his activities and seemed totally unimpressed when I explained them to him.” Other notes in my record have him commenting that I was “a wise ass.”

the cost of computing would fall so fast that it would soon be nearly free.

The inaugural issue of the PCC newsletter set forth their mission: Computers Are Mostly Used Against People Instead Of For People Used To Control People Instead Of To Free Them Time To Change All That…

One day, if things went as we hoped, Micro-Soft would be what we called a “software factory.” We’d provide a broad range of products that would be regarded as the best in the business. And if things went really well, I thought that maybe we could have a big team of skilled programmers working for us.

Eventually we learned that the men were from a company named Pertec. Pertec? I had never heard of it. I went to Widener Library (yes, this was before you could search for things like this on the internet) and found a write-up. Pertec, or Peripheral Equipment Corporation, was a publicly traded maker of disk drives and other storage devices for large computers. It was based in California, and it was big: over a thousand employees and nearly a hundred million dollars in annual revenue.

As I grow older, though, I find myself looking back more and more. Piecing together memories helps me better understand myself, it turns out. It’s a marvel of adulthood to realize that when you strip away all the years and all the learning, much of who you are was there from the start.

My Harvard professor Harry Lewis went the extra mile to help color in my memories of Aiken Lab and Harvard life in the early 1970s, and though it doesn’t appear on these pages, I owe Harry for my introduction to the “pancake problem.” (For the record, I wasn’t the one who moved the classroom clock ahead by ten minutes when Harry wasn’t looking.)