Source Code

Source Code: My Beginnings is the first installment of a three-part memoir by American businessman and philanthropist Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft. The memoir tracks Gates’s life from his early days in Seattle, Washington, through his unfinished time at Harvard University, to the founding of Microsoft in the mid-1970s. Major themes in the memoir include Cultural Changes in Mid-Century America, The Importance of Exploration in Education, and The Value of Rivalry in Innovation. 

This guide refers to the 2025 Penguin Random House e-book edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of death.

Summary

As a teenager, Gates had two loves: computers and hiking. On a particularly rough hike in the Olympic Mountains, he attempted to develop a coding language for a new personal computer. Years later, that language served as the early foundation of his company, Microsoft.

Gates was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington. His parents came from vastly different backgrounds; his father was a poor G.I., and his mother was a wealthy, confident sorority girl. As a child, Gates learned pattern recognition and analysis while playing cards with his grandmother Gami. Gates’s early childhood years were shaped by his parents’ participation in Seattle politics and society, including the 1957 Century 21 fair in Seattle, which highlighted America’s technological goals and sparked Gates’s early interest in technology.

As Gates entered elementary school, his love of reading exposed him to new kinds of learning, and he quickly gained confidence in his intelligence. Although this confidence caused him to question his parents’ authority, he also took on new responsibilities at his school library. In his final year of elementary school, Gates’s struggles with his parents’ authority intensified, and they took him to a therapist, who encouraged him to redirect his energy toward preparing for an independent adult life.

Gates began seventh grade at the prestigious Lakeside School, where he was exposed to computers and met Paul Allen, the future co-founder of Microsoft. As a result of Gates’s programming skills, he began working with a local computer company to refine software. This unrestricted computer time was foundational for Gates, who learned through trial and error rather than formal instruction. When he and Allen illegally accessed the computers under an administrative log-in, they were banned from further access. Gates used his newfound free time to join a Boy Scout troop known for wilderness camping.

As Gates entered ninth grade, he determined to take school seriously. Along with Allen and Kent Evans, Gates formed the Lakeside Programming Group and secured a contract with a Portland-based company to produce payroll software. Although the contract created tension in the group, the program was successful. Gates and Evans were hired to develop software to help Lakeside School schedule classes when the student body grew after female students were admitted. After Evans died in a tragic hiking accident, Gates and Allen redirected their grief into finishing the project, bonding in the process.

In his senior year of high school, Gates tried to expand his skillset by auditioning for the school play. He earned the lead role. That winter and spring, he left Lakeside to work for a national utility with Allen. The experience tested their friendship. As a freshman at Harvard, Gates was granted access to the legendary Aiken Computing Laboratory, where he developed a baseball simulator as an independent study project. He was admitted into an advanced pure mathematics course but struggled with his confidence when he was not the smartest in the class. At the urging of his friends, including Allen, he sent out resumes to computing companies.

During Gates’s sophomore year, he and Allen learned of a new personal computer, the Altair 8800, being sold for less than $400. Together, they developed a coding language for the computer and attempted to sell it to the manufacturer. The code was successful, and Gates and Allen formed a new company, Micro-soft, to license the software. Despite this success, Harvard administrators admonished Gates for producing commercial software on their computers. Gates avoided expulsion by apologizing.

In the summer of 1975, Gates and Allen moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to work directly with Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) and build their company. They faced challenges, including software pirating, tension over licensing with MITS, and the growing pains of a new business. They hired Marc McDonald and Ric Weiland as their first employees and officially incorporated as Microsoft, without the original hyphen. When MITS was purchased by a large computing company, Pertec, they stopped paying Microsoft, forcing the companies into arbitration. As a result, the MITS-Microsoft contract was severed, allowing Microsoft to grow exponentially. Gates and Allen decided to move the company back to Seattle, where their work with computers began.

Reflecting on his career, Gates attributes his success to his privileged upbringing, the luck of being born as the computing revolution began, and the supportive adults in his life, especially his parents.