Source Code: My Beginnings

Before Microsoft, before Windows, before the fortune — there was a boy in Seattle, the son of a lawyer and a force-of-nature mother, who discovered at thirteen that he was capable of something completely unusual: the ability to think about computing at a level of abstraction that almost no one around him could match. Bill Gates’s memoir of his early life, Source Code, is the story of how that ability was discovered, cultivated, and eventually directed toward the project that would change the world.

Gates is a more reflective and more candid narrator of his own life than his public persona might suggest — honest about his obsessiveness, his social difficulties, his complex relationship with his parents, and the specific combination of luck and extraordinary ability that put him in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment. The portrait of the early computing world — the Homebrew Computer Club, the initial Microsoft partnership with Paul Allen, the first IBM deal — is vivid and specific.

Essential reading for anyone interested in technology, entrepreneurship, or the specific conditions that produce world-historical achievement. Published by Allen Lane.