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Key Facts "Source Code: My Beginnings" is the first of three planned personal memoirs by Gates and will cover his early life and the formation of Microsoft through the late 1970s, when the company signed its first deal with Apple.
The Wall Street Journal published an extensive excerpt from the book in which Gates describes his teenage years taking "expeditions" through the mountains around Seattle with his friends, writing computer code for a PDP-8 machine on loan to his high school and the “lucky timing” that saw him born at the right time and under the right circumstances to succeed.
He also reflected on how he would become obsessed with certain projects, miss social cues and "could be rude and inappropriate without seeming to notice" how it impacted others—traits he equated to what is now called neurodivergence and said, if he was growing up today, "I probably would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum."
He said in an interview with The Times of London there were conversations in his early school years that he might be “retarted” and he was threatened with being held back, but that he “needed my neurodiversity” to write the software that would later lead to Microsoft.
While promoting the book with The Times, Gates took a more comprehensive view of his life, reflecting on his time at Harvard, his marriage and the guiding principles he learned from his strong family life.
He calls the death of his best friend and first business partner, Kent Evans, at 17 years old “the only negative thing that happened to me,” and credits strong female role models like his mother and maternal grandmother with giving him the competitive drive that pushed him to succeed.
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