# Source Code: My Beginnings by Gates, Bill ## Prologue Looking back on it now, I’m sure all of us were searching for something on those trips beyond camaraderie and a sense of accomplishment. We were at that age when kids test their limits, experiment with different identities—and also sometimes feel a yearning for bigger, even transcendent experiences. I had started to feel a clear longing to figure out what my path would be. I wasn’t sure what direction it would take, but it had to be something interesting and consequential. ## Chapter One: Trey A life well-lived meant living simply, giving your time and money to others, and, most of all, using your brain—staying engaged with the world. Often she was the smartest person in the room, but she was careful to let others shine. She was basically a shy person, but she had an inner confidence that presented as a Zen-like calm. 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. ## Chapter Two: View Ridge 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. School, however, felt slow. I found it hard to stay interested in what we were learning; ## Chapter Three: Rational Through our daily entries my mother ensured we were giving ourselves lessons in geography, geology, economics, history, and even math… and, in the thrill of noticing things, the art of paying attention. Reading in the back of the car—or anywhere for that matter—was my default state. When I read, hours flew by. I tuned out the world, only dimly aware of my family moving through life around me, my mother asking me to set the table, my sister playing with her friends. I was in my own head, with my door closed, or in the back of the car, at a barbecue, at church—anywhere I could steal time to dive between the covers of a book, where I could explore and soak up new facts, all on my own, without anyone else. 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? ## Chapter Four: Lucky Kid It was in every way a dream assignment. In the privacy of my room, away from the judging eyes of other kids, I could do what I liked the most: read, collect facts, and synthesize information. The truth was, I felt most at home in my own head. Years later my parents told journalists that once when my mother tried to draw me out, I snapped,“I’m thinking! Don’t you ever think? You should try it sometime.” Normally my tendency would be to shut out questions like that. But he seemed sincerely interested in what I had to say rather than leading up to a lesson of some kind, or something he wanted me to do. I was destined to win my imagined war with my parents. With each year my independence would grow. In time I would be on my own. All the while—then and into the future—my mother and father would love me. How great was that? Win the war and never lose their love. “Give it up,” he told my parents.“He’s going to win.” ## Chapter Five: Lakeside I didn’t fit in, and I didn’t know how to fix that. So I pretended that I didn’t want to. Unlike me, he didn’t care. Social position, and even what others thought of him, didn’t seem to touch Kent. He lived for himself and his interests, which he pursued intensely, way beyond what you’d imagine for a twelve-year-old. 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. He seemed certain he was destined for great things and just had to figure out the best of the many paths to achieve them. I was the kind of kid who wanted to win every game I played, yet I had no particular aim beyond victory. I was raw intelligence, an information omnivore, but I wasn’t thinking about the long-term direction of my life. Kent’s ambition would help spark mine and channel my prodigious competitive drive. Few rules meant that Lakeside teachers were free to experiment. If a student had a burning interest in a topic, his teacher could deviate from whatever they had planned to teach and run in a new direction. The school hired with an eye for teachers deeply interested in their fields and who had real expertise. this caliber of instructor would be confident in giving students room to explore—even if that meant pushing boundaries. I loved how the computer forced me to think. It was completely unforgiving in the face of mental sloppiness. It demanded that I be logically consistent and pay attention to details. One misplaced comma or semicolon and the thing wouldn’t work. This surge of creativity, I realize in hindsight, was the intentional outcome of brilliant guidance—or I should say lack of guidance. Fred ran the computer room with the same philosophy. No sign-up sheet, no locked door, no formal instruction. ## Chapter Six: Free Time Why am I wasting time here when I could be at the computer? without that lucky break of free computer time—call it my first 500 hours—the next 9,500 hours might not have happened at all. Free study was an earned right, one that could be forfeited if your grades dropped. ## Chapter Seven: Just Kids? I’d always possessed the ability to hyperfocus. Now I was becoming aware of how I could harness that ability to my advantage at school. If I truly concentrated on a subject, taking in the facts and theorems, dates and names and ideas and whatever else, my mind automatically sorted the information within a framework that was structured and logical. And with that framework came a sense of control: I knew precisely where to access facts and how to synthesize what I had stored. One root of the word“education” is the Latin word educere, meaning“to lead or draw out.” Most of my Lakeside teachers intuited that they could draw me out further by challenging me. To question what you know—what you think is true—is how the world advances. During his sabbatical, Dan had traveled the United States studying independent schools, concluding that students did best when they were free of constraints. He wanted to see a world with “no compulsory schooling,” he told our school newspaper that fall. Kids should find their own motivations to learn. Once they did, they’d succeed. More unscheduled time, more elective classes, more nontraditional ways of learning added up to more motivated students. Up to that point everything we had attempted with computers was practice, with no real-world results, like managing stocks and bonds in Kent’s board game. Make-believe. Now we’d shown ourselves—and the world in our minds—that we could create something of value. ## Chapter Eight: The Real World Those three words of my father’s, and their tone, have stayed with me ever since. I hear you. To me, they captured the essence of my dad’s quiet power. Unmoved by the man’s arguments, my father simply acknowledged that he had noted them; in not saying anything else, he made clear that he did not accept them. Presenting himself in letters as “marketing manager” for Lakeside Programming Group, Kent pitched prospective customers our DECtapes. There were so many variables to coordinate, starting with the needs and desires of hundreds of students, each taking nine classes in an eleven-period day. Throw into that mix the schedules of 70 courses, 170 sections of those courses, and a long list of special considerations: drum class couldn’t be scheduled in the room above choir practice; while most classes covered just one period, some, like dance or biology lab, took up two. It was a very hard math problem. For all the pressure we felt writing the payroll program, most of it was self-imposed. We had no critical deadline. The schedule program felt entirely different. A whole school, my whole school, expected us to fix it. And everyone would know if we failed. This was the first time I felt responsible for something larger than myself. Kent and I took to reminding ourselves:“This isn’t a class project. It’s the real world.” Kent, as always, immediately saw a bigger opportunity. He was convinced that with our success at Lakeside, we could entice other schools around the country to pay us to manage their schedules using our software. I learned that he was probably the most gung ho among the student climbers but also struggled the most. He was the last one up on nearly every climb. I also learned that as the month-long course progressed, more and more people had dropped out, finding it too tough or too dangerous. But Kent was determined to go on the final climb. It was his nature to always push the limits of what was expected. More than anyone I’d ever met, Kent was driven by the promise of all the amazing places his life would take him, from career success to an overland trip through Peru in a Land Rover that he’d acquire somewhere, somehow. One legacy of my friendship with Kent was the realization that another person can help you be better. That summer Paul and I forged a partnership that would define the rest of our lives, though we didn’t know it at the time. A partner brings something to the relationship that you lack; they inspire you to up your own game. With Paul as my partner, I felt more assured about tackling a challenge that was on the edge of my capabilities. Having someone taking the same risky step alongside you emboldens you to take the next one. Maybe we could build the computer that rapidly turns holes on paper into usable traffic data for hundreds if not thousands of cities around the country? Which is how in the fall of 1972 Paul and I ended up in the industrial area of South Seattle telling a sales guy we wanted to buy a single Intel 8008 chip. Even now it makes me laugh to imagine how surprised the sales guy at the store must have been, wondering what the heck we were thinking. ## Chapter Nine: One Act and Five Nines I hadn’t anticipated how rewarding it would feel to venture out of my comfort zone. That was something I was really looking forward to about college: the chance to once again redefine myself. The trick was to match fluctuating power supply with fluctuating demand. What does it take to be 20 percent better than everyone else? How much is that just latent talent versus dedicated effort—being relentlessly focused and deliberate about performing better today than you did the day before? And then repeating that tomorrow and the next day and the next for years and years? My view at the time was that advances in the world sprang from individuals. My solo-scientist view of the world was grist for an on-and-off debate with Paul. He saw the world advancing through collaboration, in which teams of smart people pulled together toward a common goal. Where I saw Einstein as the model, he saw the Manhattan Project. ## Chapter Ten: Precocious In much of academia, computers were not yet a serious area of study in their own right. Computer science at most universities typically nested within more established departments, such as at Harvard, where it was part of Engineering and Applied Physics. The pride of that department was fluid dynamics, a field built on centuries of elegant math invented to describe how birds fly and blood flows. Computer science might be a nice tool to study those phenomena but was in no way seen as an equal. Typically, a student interested in computers majored in applied math or engineering. It would be another ten years before Harvard offered an undergraduate degree in computer science. I was used to wowing adults with my grasp of what was still an arcane world. Hearing about these experiments gave me an idea for my independent study. I liked the idea of connecting the graphics-capable PDP-1 with the more powerful machine across the room. I very quickly fell into the easygoing, democratic culture of the place. 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. And yet, late into that first semester, I felt at loose ends. I had come to Harvard from a small school, not even ninety people in my graduating class. At Lakeside, once I found my footing, it had been easy to excel and be recognized. Helping too was a tight community of teachers, administrators, and parents who supported me. They knew I was an outlier, a bright, awkward kid who needed an occasional nudge(Sign up for drama, Bill!) or door opened(Sure, take a trimester off to work). At Harvard I was on my own, swimming in a much bigger pool. Everyone had been the top of their high school class, everyone knew how to excel, and everyone was striving to be the best. I signed up for the psychology class because someday computers would match the power of the human brain. ## Chapter Eleven: Wild Card I reverted to shielding my insecurities with nonchalance. “Bill, see this. Existence exists,” he said as we stared at the dewy car trunk. It was one of those moments that seem perfectly cosmic at the time and purely silly once the acid wears off. these people lacked imagination for what the future could hold. For three years Paul and I had been talking about how new computers that exploited the exponential improvement of chips could change everything. I looked up at Paul.“It’s happening without us,” he said. The room temperature was kept in the low fifties—perfect for cooling the PDP-10 but cold if you’re sitting there for hours on end. In my winter jacket I’d code until I’d get tired and either sleep at the terminal or curl up on the floor near where the computer threw off heat. ## Chapter Thirteen: Micro-Soft Computers Are Mostly Used Against People Instead Of For People Used To Control People Instead Of To Free Them Time To Change All That… Software companies didn’t exist—or at least the kind of software company Paul and I wanted to build didn’t exist. And our product was something our potential customers thought should be free. But we had our one customer and faith that we could build from there. ## Chapter Fourteen: Source Code Until that point, we were a band of friends whose futures didn’t worry me. If everything blew up, I was confident that we’d head off in our various directions and be fine. But now we were hiring people we didn’t know and asking them to move to New Mexico and cast their lot with us, an eighteen-month-old company with an unclear future. It was a bit daunting. To me, those early hires made Micro-Soft feel like a real company. As proudly independent as I imagined myself, in truth my family supported me in ways both practical and emotional. ## Epilogue there are days when I’d like to be thirteen again, making that bargain with the world that if you just go forward, learn more, understand better, you can make something truly useful and new. Curiosity can’t be satisfied in a vacuum, of course. It requires nurturing, resources, guidance, support. What I do know is that my parents afforded me the precise blend of support and pressure I needed: they gave me room to grow emotionally, and they created opportunities for me to develop my social skills. Instead of allowing me to turn inward, they pushed me out into the world—to the baseball team, the Cub Scouts, and other Cheerio families’ dinner tables. And they gave me constant exposure to adults, immersing me in the language and ideas of their friends and colleagues, which fed my curiosity about the world beyond school. 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.