Source Code: My Beginnings

Despite all his obvious accomplishments, one gets the feeling Gates felt the need to prove himself in this memoir of his early years. Does he make his point? I would say yes, resoundingly. Many parts of the Bill Gates story will be familiar to someone like me who grew up in that era and got into personal computers in the early eighties. Throughout those years, much of the narrative surrounding Gates and Microsoft wasn't very flattering. But after reading this book, I see Gates in a somewhat different light. A boy who grew up to realize his full potential and fully deserving his mammoth success. Bill Gates from a very young age was an outlier; intelligent with a passion for math, ambitious, hard-working and prescient about the world of computing. Gates was bound to have been successful no matter what career path he pursued. That he founded Microsoft and eventually etched his place in tech and business history is obviously the result of his own abilities and efforts but also a touch of good fortune as he himself admits. He was in the right place, surrounded by the right people at the right time. His parents, as Gates repeatedly points out, were a huge influence on him and his eventual success. Though understandable, his portrayal of them as virtually flawless seems a little unrealistic. Gates was not just a good coder, he was also very business savvy. At an age when most young founders would not be too focused on things like contracts and lawyers and tax consultants, Gates made sure he got things right from the start. Maybe having a father who was an accomplished lawyer helped. His attention to detail in the contracts he negotiated, his desire to always do things the proper way, his insistence on a 64-36 split of Microsoft with his partner Paul Allen are all signs of him thinking way into the future. To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised at how enjoyable and engaging this book proved to be. I’m now looking forward to the promised second installment of his memoirs.

The first of a planned trilogy, this book was very well-written and a fascinating story. I think what I admired the most was Gates's ability to capture the voices of his mother's "precocious brat" (approximately 7 years old), the socially insecure and very rebellious teenager, and the cocky but secretly unsure college student. The book ends with the founding of the startup Micro-Soft. More to come, the author promises, and I can hardly wait. In today's world, Gates would have been been instantly diagnosed as being "somewhere on the spectrum." But he was blessed with extraordinary parents and a therapist (a very interesting part of the book) who helped the family negotiate a peace, and let Gates become who he is. Lots of good life lessons in this one.

Source Code is a really nice autobiography on the formative years of Bill Gates. He focuses on his childhood and the characteristics of his family and takes the reader on the journey through his life as the world moving into the electronic age. One gets a picture of the world changing in real time and one of the most important innovators of that age through his own experiences. It comes across as honest and earnest and though I typically don't read autobiographies I am glad I read this to understand better the climate of the time in the early computer age. Bill Gates is obviously an icon of a monumental era and though he will inevitably have people who like and dislike him the perspective from his own words should be something of interest to a wide audience. The book does not focus on Microsoft in its later life nor anything regarding the company in the last 25 years but as the title suggests focuses on Bill Gates's personal story that led to the founding of Microsoft. One does see that he came from a hardworking and honest family that increased in its privilege through the fathers career progression as a lawyer, he was to benefit from having a father of such stature at times when Bill was under the microscope later. One gets an understanding of his fortune in having a school with early access to compute power and how he and his closest friends including Paul Allen took unique advantage of this to become experts in an immensely growing space by perseverance and passion. Bill tells his story as a kid who was talented with raw intelligence for whom maturity grew with time, but his drive in high school becomes very clear to the reader as his passion was not only for programming and computers but also for the commercial enterprise that was growing on the back of it. The book goes into how he and his close knit group were writing software for enterprises while still in high school and how their managing to get access to computer time was critical to their growth. He talks about his experience in high school and his access to great and supportive teachers that led to his acceptance to Harvard. One gets the first hand story of Harvard and why he eventually left which really brings the reader in to the way driven entrepreneurs saw the world at critical junctures. The whole book makes on sympathetic to the life choices of Bill Gates and brings him rightful admiration for being excellent and driven at a critical juncture. Many parts of Microsoft's story will be there on Wikipedia but the first hand account of how Bill met some critical early joiners, why they joined, what were their talents, how did the group get along, what drove each of their interests is all very helpful in making sense of the story of Microsoft. Having read two different biography type books recently of tech moguls, one a biography (of Jensen Huang and Nvidia) and this autobiography of Bill's formative years, I am glad I read both. It is enjoyable to read and brings Bill Gates down to earth and shows his honesty, early intelligence and brings the reader to sympathize with the path taken and experiences that drove the decision making. Definitely a nice book to check out if one has some spare time

To those of us who have followed Microsoft and Bill Gates since the dawn of the personal computer age (and unto its death) most of this story is already known. Still, its nice to get the story from the "source". Mr. Gates writes in a simple forthright style that makes for pleasant listening, and I found myself enjoying the entire tale. For those of us born in the fifties, it is also a nostalgic glance at a world that has largely disappeared. A few of the reviews have criticized the detailed accounts of the card games with his family (especially his grandmother) but if you are looking for clues to the secret of his success, the keen competitive spirit that was instilled in him at an early age explains a lot. I appreciated Gate's acknowledging the fortuitous time (post WWII) , place (the United States) and genes (white male) that played into his life, but while many others (including myself) had the same advantages, the results were hardly the same. I give this book 5 stars because it has been some time since I have had such a pleasant read. The narrator also did a nice job, and it was easy to lapse into believing I was listening to Gate's himself (he did narrate the prologue and epilogue, which made nice bookends).

This was a wonderful book. More than I expected. Easy read, but hit all emotions. I looked forward to reading every page. Plus, so much I didn’t know, even though much has been written about B. Gates (I’d never been a huge fan). The childhood he describes makes you yearn both for that magical time before adulthood and before the technological boom he was about to experience. So many experiences kids don’t have today. But, it goes beyond his childhood. This book makes you realize how deep childhood and young adult friendships can influence what you become. Written with humor, sensitivity, and insight learned from his past, he makes you feel the laughs, tears, and excitement. Excitement for a computer boom these young kids felt was coming, but really had no idea how big it would become. I highly recommend.

If you didn't live in the Altair era (or even if you did!) this book was tremendously enjoyable and educational. I knew Bill to some extent. I interacted with him during his book two era as a leading analyst with Gartner Group (aka Gartner Inc.) I was several years older than Bill but I also lived through the Altair desktop computer era. That era drove me to change careers, moving from academia (Brain Sciences) to Digital Equipment in 1977, where I stayed until 1994 when I joined Gartner as an analyst. This book explains much of the riddle of Bill Gates -- family, upbringing (self upbringing), education and early entrepreneurship. I remember vividly visiting him and Steve Balmer in Bill's Camp GaveAway (was that the name?) on the Hood Canal for a couple of days. I was with a group of 12 to 15 industry analysts invited to share thoughts with Bill. Gates had this tremendous nervous energy, constantly shaking his legs when sitting and thinking. I still have my copy of the group picture from that meeting. Go read volume 1, "Source Code: My Beginnings" to understand where and how he evolved, grew, and developed into the genius who ran Microsoft. Volume 1 has many valuable stories. The Altair story is what drove me to switch, at age 28, into computer industry. (I can't wait to get volumes 2 and 3. How do I get an advance copy? )

Surprisingly good! I've read a few of his other technical books that were OK but nothing to write home about. This one was a quick and fun read. Bill Gates as a child, then teen and young adult made me admire him that much more. A nerdy, precocious brilliant child makes one heck of an entrepreneur.

I stayed up until 4 a m. to read this book on my Amazon Kindle. It's interesting and very well written and edited. Tells about Bill Gates's early years. His childhood, his upbringing, his grandparents, his friends and their hiking adventures, how his parents met, competitive family card games led by his maternal grandmother, trouble adjusting to school, conflicts with his parents, especially his mother, and even being sent to therapy. Then there is learning about and doing computer programming from private Lakeside School in Seattle to Harvard, followed by starting Microsoft. There is a little too much detail about the small stuff and starting the business. But overall it's a very personable story. I started reading it as soon as I got the download. I liked it immediately and didn't stop for six or seven hours. Not a book I expected from a computer geek. This book is about Gates's early years and has a lot of human interest. Gates even writes that today he might have been diagnosed as autistic. And he notes that sometimes he made obnoxious and inappropriate comments, had little social interactions and was most comfortable in his own mind. His parents tried to control him to no avail, causing him to rebel. As a reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in the late 1980s, I covered Gates and Microsoft, as well as Boeing, in the early days. Gates seemed like a self-absorbed jerk and geek in those days. But mostly I recall his predicting there would be a computer in every office and eventually in every home. No one believed him. At that time people were just trying to figure out what a computer could do. Gates would eventually build a giant company and an industry, followed by fighting diseases around the world with his foundation. But the story of that will have to wait for two sequel books he is planning. Meanwhile, I recommend reading this interesting book about his early beginnings. An argument could be made to put it all into one large book. Hopefully he will do the sequels he plans on running Microsoft and on tackling world problems of climate, diseases and education with his foundation.