Source Code: My Beginnings

by Bill Gates

I’d picture the code and then try to trace how the computer would follow my commands.

joy I apparently felt seemed to override all other emotions. My other notable early trait might be described as excess energy.

Kristi, for one, did what she was told, played easily with other kids, and from the start got great grades. I did none of those things.

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.

Dorm had “no sense of personal limitations whatsoever,” my dad said admiringly.

This climate of limitless potential was the backdrop for my early life

I got the sense that my parents were in close touch with my teachers, more than other parents were.

Somewhere around third or fourth grade, I realized that it wasn’t cool to be reading the World Book for fun, or playing hearts with your grandmother, or wanting to talk about why

bridges don’t collapse. A summer reading program at our library was only me and girls. At recess other kids broke off with their cliques, and I’d be on my own. Bigger kids picked on me. Looking back, I can’t say I felt lonely or even hurt. More than anything I was just kind of baffled: Why didn’t kids see things my way?

I was eight years old, joining a scout pack of sixty-five other boys run by fathers whose memories of the Army, Navy, and Marines during the Second World War were still fresh. That meant that the pack was run with order and organization.

1964, I was an energetic, curious kid who had zero qualms about interrupting the class with odd questions and taking up a lot of the teacher’s time.

By the time I was done, I had generated 177 pages on little Delaware.

When I was in middle school, my parents’ bridge partner, Dan Evans, was our state’s governor.

I liked the feeling of asking a guest a smart question and being able to hold my own in the conversation.

My dad told me how Dr. Edmark had nursed his company along for years, barely making any money, until he was finally faced with the possibility of having to give it up.

was fascinated by this story of a doctor-inventor who made a machine for saving lives, but also by what my sixth-grade brain could absorb about raising capital, patents and profits, research and development.

in the objective analysis of Anderson—and other teachers that year—I was below average.

But if I’d been paying attention to the final issue of the Lakeside newspaper that spring, I would have noticed a two-paragraph story at the bottom of the second page. It said that starting in the fall, the math department was going to get connected to a computer. “Hopefully some students will use it to work on extensive projects,” the story mused.

This intensity intrigued me. If he liked something, Kent went all in. As the author of a wood-bound, 177-page disquisition on the state of Delaware, I could appreciate this.

All these years later it still amazes me how so many disparate things had to come together for me to use a computer in 1968.

had the gall to tell the woman who played the title role that it was a stupid play, one of several gratuitously rude comments I made that clearly betrayed more about me than anything else. That kind of bad behavior always ate at me afterward.

As the two remaining members of the Lakeside Programming Group, Kent and I were left to finish PAYROL. We labored over it all summer, sorting through the states with income taxes and contacting the U.S. Treasury for rules on savings bond deductions. After nine months on a project we thought would take three, we finished the program in August. Best of all: it worked.

One legacy of my friendship with Kent was the realization that another person can help you be better.

I laid down $360 in cash—about $2,400 today—that I had earned from the scheduling-program job.

The invention of the microprocessor would prove to be the single most significant event in my professional life. Without it, there would be no Microsoft.

I’d worked on the payroll program, the school scheduling program was a hit, and I had my own company that was going to automate traffic studies in American cities.

broke my record for sustained work that spring, once not leaving the Time Tunnel underground for nearly a hundred hours straight.

was working crazy hours, subsisting on Tang and pizza; it felt like the

most free and easy time I’d had in my life.

They prodded me to leapfrog to graduate school, study computer programming, and then get a job at Digital Equipment Corp. “You belong there,” one of the programmers said. “You belong back there working with those guys, deciding what the next version of the operating system will be.”

It would be another ten years before Harvard offered an undergraduate degree in computer science.

Those first months of college, I was like a kid in a candy shop, dazzled by the seemingly limitless access to experts and intellectual stimulation.

Even today I cringe when I think about my rudeness. My mom surely would have called me out for being a precocious brat.

The business of manufacturing computers seemed too risky to me. We’d have to buy parts, hire people to assemble the machines, and find lots of space to pull it off. And how would we ever realistically compete with big companies like IBM or fast-rising Japanese electronics makers?

Software was different. No wires, no factories. Writing software was just brainpower and time. And

‘Let me know when someone comes out with a machine built around the 8080.’ Well, here it is—check

Such was the dawn of the personal computer revolution. We all were just faking our way along.

With that, the first piece of software written for the first personal computer came to life.

Digital Equipment Corp.

A lot had changed since Howard Aiken built his huge Mark I mechanical calculator in the 1940s,

At the time, if anyone asked what our goal was, I’d describe the software factory vision, or just say that we wanted to get our software on every personal computer in the world.

The monetary, legal, and management decisions involved are very difficult, as I’m sure you know. I feel my contribution towards these tasks entitles me to more than %50 percent of Microsoft.” We should split ownership of the company sixty-forty, I continued firmly. I thought that was only fair. “I have great optimism for our work together. If things go well I intend to take a full year off from school,” I wrote in closing. Paul agreed to the split.

My mind needed to make order of everything I heard, every new piece of information that I was soaking up. I’d talk and talk and then notice that everyone else was done eating.

The type of person who comes up with the Brilliant Idea isn’t often the best person to turn it into a business.

As a measure of where we stood, Micro-Soft that year

would declare taxes on revenue of just $16,005, which included the $3,000 MITS gave us up front. As for future business, we had made lots of connections and generated promising leads, but no deals yet.

So close to the brass ring and then—based on deeper loyalties to his firm, and to my mom—he let it pass.

We found ourselves obsessed with The Pallisers, a BBC production of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels.

at age forty-four he graduated from Mercer University with his medical degree. For the rest of his life, Ed operated a small clinic that served rural Georgians.

the “1977 Trinity,”