Source Code by Bill Gates: He became one of the world’s most successful men and a multi-billionaire but in his autobiography Bill Gates reveals…Aged nine, I was called stupid and told to stay back a year
SOURCE CODE by Bill Gates (Allen Lane £25, 336pp)
Source Code is available now from the Mail Bookshop
When Bill Gates was nine, a therapist said he was ‘retarded’. He wasn’t bad at his lessons. It was his voice – he was squeaky.
She recommended he be held back a year while she taught him how to develop a ‘big daddy-bear voice’. She made him pronounce the letter ‘r’ as he licked peanut butter off a bread stick.
Just over a decade later, Gates had co-founded Microsoft, got into every university he applied to (except Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but then only because he couldn’t be bothered to go to the interview) and was hurrying on to become the world’s richest man.
Source Code is a good title for this gentle, pensive autobiography. Gates likes the idea of self-digitalisation. He marks even that early act of therapeutic child abuse as useful because it added a bit to his thirst for independent thinking, which would later prove so useful to him.
Another teacher, spotting a glimmer of the future in the boy, had suggested Gates be moved up a year, not down. ‘If these supposed experts don’t know what to do with me,’ thought Gates with great self-possession, ‘why should I care about their opinions?’
Gates kidded about, babbled and questioned everything at school. Grades were awarded for a combination of quality (A, B, C) and effort (1, 2, 3). It didn’t make sense to Gates that the top score was A1. ‘If you truly were smart, you’d be able to get an A with as little effort as possible, so A3 should be the best grade.’
Mrs Carson,’ he peeped to his fourth grade teacher (Year Five, in the UK), ‘please give me an A3’.
Baby Bill: At 7 years old, young Bill Gates would have no idea how much he would go on to achieve
In ninth grade he rarely opened his textbooks. But after school he’d hurry home and work like mad on a second set of books he kept hidden in his bedroom.
One of the mild surprises of Source Code is that preppy Bill Gates, archdeacon of nerdiness, was cool at school.
Another mild surprise is that he is prepared to admit to this embarrassing deception with the textbooks.
A third, that the plan didn’t work. ‘I always remembered ninth grade as the year I made straight As,’ he observes. ‘But recently I came across my transcript and was surprised to see a mix of As and Bs (including one in biology).’
Gates’s trouble as a memoirist is that his life has been too easy, speech therapists aside; he is balanced and kind; his parents were supportive and interesting; his obstacles, never threatening.
By the end of Source Code, the first of a projected three volume memoir, Gates is in his 20s. He’s dropped out of Harvard, Microsoft is racing towards world dominance, but his favourite drink is still a Shirley Temple mocktail. (Ginger beer, grenadine and a maraschino cherry: even Temple thought they were ‘icky’ and refused to drink them.)
The nearest Gates’s childhood got to being dodgy was when he was 16. He and his school friend Paul Allen, with whom he later set up Microsoft, found themselves wandering about an industrial area of South Seattle, looking for a dealer.
For $360 (about £2,000 today) the man handed Gates an aluminium wrap. Too excited to wait, they ripped open the packet on the spot.
With any other hero of autobiography there would have been 5g heroin inside, or the finger of a kidnapped friend; with Bill Gates it was ‘a stick of chewing gum with 18 gold legs’ – the Intel 8008 microprocessor chip.
The fastest computer chip in the world, the 8008 had been released only months before and was difficult to find. (Gates doesn’t mention this in Source Code, but their dealer cheated them, as dealers do: according to the Intel catalogue, the price should have been $120.)
Gates had seen his first computer in 1962, at the Seattle World Fair, when he was seven. It was a miraculous machine – an IBM 1620 – dirt cheap for its time: only $100,000. Gates didn’t fall in love with it. He preferred the Belgian waffles.
His interest in computing began two years later, when he heard a ‘chug-chug-chug’ sound coming from the maths classroom at his private school, ‘like a cog-railway grinding its way up the side of a mountain’. It was a teletype machine, connected by telephone to a computer far away in California.
No ordinary high school could have afforded such a thing: $1,000 a year, just for the hire; $8 extra for every hour of computer time.
Gates had seen his first computer in 1962, at the Seattle World Fair, but didn’t fall in love with it. He preferred the Belgian waffles on offer
Then the woman who was deputy director of the Washington University computer lab gave Gates free time on the machines there. All his young life, as Gates is quick to acknowledge, he did well by the beneficence of adults.
For years he climbed out of his bedroom window when he should have been sleeping, and hurried down the street to do some coding at a nearby computer. Another time he and Allen came across some digger trucks one night at a building site. The keys were still in the ignition, so they drove around merrily in the dark.
Gates’s smartest move in mathematics (his strongest subject) was to give it up when he got to Harvard. He lacked the eerie artistry that marks out real brilliance in the field. But he had something almost as rare: flexibility of mind.
He remembered all that work he’d done on computing, accepted that pure mathematics was out of his reach and returned full time to programming. Humility kept him swaggering in the right place.
The pleasure of this reflective book is the sense of Old Bill Gates peeking over your shoulder. He is as bemused by Young Bill Gates as you are. Who is this peculiar, but not that peculiar, skinny boy with his high-pitched voice and habit of rocking back and forth when excited?
He’s distinctly clever, but not a genius; he wants to be a good person, but also better than everyone else; he’s ruthless and kind, awkward and adept, astonishingly prescient yet sweetly naive. He’s a precocious distortion of the boy next door.
