Gates explores making of his internal operating system

Washington: As he prepares to turn 70 later this year, Microsoft founder Bill Gates' new memoir explores how his childhood quirks, upbringing, friendships and experiences coalesced into shaping his internal operating system.

In “Source Code: My Beginnings,” the first installment of a trilogy retracing his journey from an often misunderstood kid to a polarising technology titan to an influential philanthropist, Gates dissects his brain's unusual wiring, delves into the emotional trauma of his best friend dying while they were both in high school, and revisits the birth of Traf-O-Data, a startup that he launched in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with another childhood friend, Paul Allen.

Traf-O-Data, conceived to create software for the groundbreaking Altair computer made Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, became Microsoft in 1975 — a year it booked $16,005 in revenue while Gates and Allen were making $9 per hour.

By 1977, Microsoft had become successful enough to embolden Gates to drop out of Harvard University. In 1979, he had decided to move Microsoft to the Seattle area where he grew up. Although Gates stepped down as Microsoft's CEO 25 years ago, the Windows operating system and other software created under his reign remain the main pillar in a company that now generates $212 billion in annual revenue, boasts a $3.1 trillion market value, and accounts for most of Gates' $100 billion personal fortune.

“Source Code” ends with Gates's drive back to Seattle in 1979, meaning it doesn't touch upon his 1994 marriage to Melinda French, nor their 2021 divorce — one of the topics likely to come up in the sequels that he still intends to write as part of a retrospective trilogy.

“I am being reflective, which is not my normal mode, but it's kind of time,” Gates said during an interview about the book with The Associated Press. “As we went back and got teacher's comments or people I worked with at Harvard, it was fascinating. I had confused myself into thinking I got straight A's in ninth grade.”

That might not sound like much of a revelation, but it was a surprise to the cerebral Gates, who paints himself in the book as a “bratty smartass” prone to dismissively sneering, “That's the stupidest thing I ever heard,” about remarks that seemed nonsensical to him.

Gate's self-portrait is that of a nerd nicknamed “Trey” by his card-playing grandmother because he was the third male on this father's side of the family to be named Bill. He was a pipsqueak who had difficulty making friends and preferred living in his own head before he discovered computers, which became like slot machines that rewarded him for writing elegant lines of code.

When he did talk, the young Gates rocked back and forth like a metronome setting a rhythm for his brain — a habit that surfaced during parts of his 45-minute interview with the AP.

“It was a little weird because it was hard to direct my attention,” Gates recalled during the interview. “I had one year in school where they said, Oh we should put you ahead a couple grades.' And then another time, they said, No, we should hold you back.' And it's like, Well make up your mind.”

He didn't realise it as a boy, Gates has no doubt he was and still is neurodivergent who channelled that anomaly into learning to programme computers at the right time in the right place with the patient support of late parents.