In the fall of 1972, William (“Trey”) Gates III reviewed his computing background in his application to Harvard. The Lakeside Programming Group he founded with three friends at their private school, Gates indicated, worked with C-Cubed, a local company, and wrote payroll, class scheduling, and automatic traffic-counting programs. Although computing provided him opportunities “to have fun, earn some money and learn a lot,” Gates declared he was now most interested in business or law.

Six years later, Gates left Harvard to co-found a software company with his childhood friend, Paul Allen. Their venture, Microsoft, developed software for microcomputers and soon relocated its headquarters — first to Albuquerque, then to Seattle, the city where Gates was born and raised.

In “Source Code,” Gates provides a candid and charming look at his formative years. Gates acknowledges the “unearned privileges” of his birth into a wealthy family, with a mom and dad who, with the encouragement of a therapist, gave their precocious, hyperkinetic, socially awkward, stubborn and sloppy middle child room to grow emotionally, albeit with some limits.

On one occasion, Gates reveals, after Mary Maxwell Gates seized the pile of clothes he left on the floor and charged him a quarter to buy them back, he “started wearing fewer clothes.” Small and skinny, with a high-pitched squeaky voice, Bill was shy around other kids and bored at school. Most at home in his own head, he enjoyed hiking and was a voracious reader.

At age 9, he read through almost every volume of the “World Book Encyclopedia.” Mathematics appealed to his sense that complex questions had answers he could figure out. He began programming computers at age 13.

Confidence in his own intellect, however, had a downside. Before he reached adolescence, Bill’s father would later say, Trey began acting like an argumentative and “sometimes not very nice adult.”

In “Source Code,” Gates also explains how he learned to harness his innate ability to hyper-focus. “Gami” Maxwell, his maternal grandmother, was valedictorian of her high school class and a talented basketball player, who took him to the cleaners night after night in a variety of card games.

“Think smart,” she’d say, as she tracked her opponent’s hand, the discards, and worked through probabilities and her untutored version of game theory. He did, though it took about five years for him to begin winning consistently. By then he was a teenager, who could place facts, theorems, dates and names in a structured framework, synthesize what he stored and recognize patterns.

With these skills “came a sense of control.” And it enhanced a competitiveness that was already in evidence at an annual Cub Scout fundraiser, when he sold 179 pounds of filberts, pecans, walnuts, Brazil nuts, almonds and other mixed nuts. Gates claims he does not remember if he was the top seller that year, or lost to a kid whose father, a barber, peddled nuts to all his customers. But he makes sure we know he was a top seller at least once.

At Harvard, Gates skipped most of his classes and completed all assigned work during the week preceding final exams. Meanwhile, he broke rules to get increased access to the university’s computer and spent an unfathomable number of hours every day on Microsoft business. When he and Paul Allen became convinced that as chips made personal computers cheaper and cheaper, demand for high quality software would be virtually limitless, Gates decided to leave Cambridge without a degree.

The rest, as they say, is history — history barely mentioned in “Source Code.”

And this titan of technology, billionaire, and founder of one of the largest private philanthropic organizations in the world, who is also a well-informed and tireless proponent of the commercialization of clean energy, chose to conclude his beguiling memoir by claiming, “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 useful and new.”

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.

First Published: February 1, 2025, 10:30 a.m.