MEMOIR
Source Code
Bill Gates
Allen Lane $55
It was a raw March morning when the first hint came that I might not be as smart as I thought. Through the chalk-dust fog, the lecture’s 200 students were fidgeting on perilously tiered benches. Each seat was occupied by another student who had just finished near the top of their school. Was the chill crawling up my spine the first hint of autumn, a jolt of competitive adrenaline or the beginnings of identity collapse? Each semester the class size halved, so by my final year the worst had been confirmed. I sat in a tiny tutorial room surrounded by 15 other mathematicians, all comfortably smarter than me. My designs to become a genius were over. The task ahead was more daunting than any Fourier Transform: figure out who I really was.
In his autobiography, Source Code: My Beginnings, Bill Gates describes a similar realisation while also studying pure mathematics (only he was at Harvard), when the boundless sense of his own exceptionalism collides with others just like him, only more so. Source Code ends just as Microsoft opens its first Seattle offices, with its bulk dedicated to Gates’ often awkward, sometimes hilarious, search for identity.
William Henry Gates III, “Trey” to his family, is arrogant, wildly precocious and prone to rocking back and forth when excited. Thankfully, the story is told by the far more modest and relaxed Gates of today who realises the myth of the lonely genius that sustained his younger self is just that – a myth. He acknowledges his stratospheric success was contingent on chance, timing and the invisible and patient support of adults around him.
Life in 1960 suburban Seattle also played a role. It would be wrong to idealise View Ridge, a place Gates acknowledges was mostly white “save for domestic help”. Wealth flowed into its middle class from Seattle’s Boeing factory far more evenly than in today’s post-industrialised US. While comfortable, the Gates family was not rich. Bill’s dad was a lawyer but also the son of a furniture salesman. The wealth they enjoyed was more societal: View Ridge feels rich for the safe world it offers Trey to freely experiment in.
Bill Gates pictured in January after an interview.Credit: AP
He tries on a variety of masks: class clown, boy scout, wilderness junkie and a stint in drama class. The only constraints limiting his free-range existence come from an overbearing mother. Mary Gates is a slightly tragic figure, also talented and fiercely ambitious but forced to squeeze her designs into the narrow domestic and social channels allowed to women in postwar America.
Placed end to end, the opportunities offered to Trey also represent a small miracle. History lesson: before personal computers access meant connecting to a giant mainframe, many in civilian hands came secondhand from the military, once used to calculate missile trajectories. Such computer “time” was a jealously guarded and expensive commodity. Somehow, over and over, teachers, parents of friends, then later, professors and business owners grant and even subsidise Gates and friends’ access to hone their programming skills. It’s like they learnt to drive on a public bus in-service.
The first such angel is a fellow student’s mother, Monique Rona, who deserves her own book. As a child in Nazi-occupied Paris she led Wehrmacht soldiers away from Jewish safe houses. She also founded the first computer time-sharing company in Seattle. During a carpool school run she hears about Gates’ passion for programming and gives Trey and co their first computer job testing a new DEC system.
