SOURCE CODE

The tech tycoon recounts his voyage from backwoods to boardrooms.

Born in 1955, Gates blended two traits early on: As a kid, he was the definitive nerd, and he was an avid fan of the outdoors, given to taking off to camp, hike, and climb for days at a time. “By the time I was in my early teens,” he writes in this fluent memoir, “my parents had accepted that I was different from many of my peers and had come to terms with the fact that I needed a certain amount of independence in making my way through the world.” His father, a prominent attorney, and mother, devoted to making sure that he had both a rounded education and at least some social graces, gave him that independence, and he ran with it—nearly getting expelled from prep school, for one thing, for hacking into a corporate computer system. Chastened, Gates and his co-conspirators—one his future partner Paul Allen—began crafting programs that would earn them entrée to the nascent tech world of Silicon Valley, with a detour at Harvard and a stint coding in the boondocks. In this narrative of his early years, ending when he was a budding mogul at just 23, Gates is sometimes self-congratulatory, proud of his ability to “hyperfocus” and to work out complex math problems without much tutelage; he also owns up to being a shark in business, a talent that for a time made him the world’s richest man and now one of its most prominent philanthropists. Yet Gates also generously acknowledges the contributions and work of other programmers, employees of what began as Micro-Soft, competitors such as Steve Jobs, and “the helping hand of beneficent adults.” As he writes in closing, “Piecing together memories helps me better understand myself, it turns out.” It will also help readers appreciate Gates’ hard-won accomplishments, and perhaps even inspire future entrepreneurs.

Well crafted and self-aware: a readable, enjoyable visit to the dawn of high tech.