From a Google Image Search – Gates Notes

Bill Gates’ memoir of his early years, Source Code, is readable and interesting. For all you nerds who are kicking yourself in the slats (a saying from my dad) for not tinkering in your garage or your basement until you came up with a multimillion-dollar product, that is not the path that took Bill Gates to his enormous fortune. While it is true that Gates did not finish college, he was lucky to have parents who, although they at first tried to rein him in and polish him up, eventually learned that he needed space, not supervision and they were able to adjust their parenting tactics. They sent their son to a school that catered to high IQ kids.

Until the point that Gates was enrolled in Lakeside Academy, he never felt that he belonged, and other children did not accept him. He had learned to be the class clown which won him some popularity, but did not challenge his true talents. Who knows, perhaps if he had continued in public school, he would have been a stand-up comic rather than a computer geek. Lakeside had access to a very early computer, which had to be connected to a main frame computer outside of the school grounds. Companies often agreed to put these monsters in schools where professors, teachers, and students could take advantage of them. An added advantage of this arrangement was the innovations that come out of young minds.

This first computer, a PDP-10 was great for writing reports, but it didn’t do anything fun. Memory which consisted of paper cards or tapes and was kludgy, messy, and offered little security. Gates set out with some friends to write BASIC programs that tweaked this behemoth. There was no such thing as a personal computer.

Bill Gates and friends read about a set you could buy to build your own computer, from a company called Altair. The computer had no keyboard, no monitor, and very little memory. But lots of nerdy folks wanted to build one. Bill Gates, et al, wrote code to beef up the little Altair computer so it could actually be used for tasks and rudimentary games. As more and more companies saw that computers were going to be good for both work and play, that they would make money, other companies produced personal computers. Gates worked with a company called MITS and wrote a BASIC code that was making that company more profitable (for a while). MITS entangled the Gates group of guys into signing away their rights to their “source code”. Before his crew could sell any more code as software, they had to go to court to win back the rights to their own source code. Fortunately Bill’s dad was a lawyer.

Eventually Gates and his friend Paul Allen formed the company Microsoft. Bill did not do most of the coding, although for a while these friends and others who drifted in and out of the group spent time coding nonstop for many days and nights, sleeping on floors in computer rooms, to meet deadlines for coding products. Gates, in later days, worked the business side of Micro-soft which became Microsoft.

Bill Gates’ parents were not wealthy, but they were not poor either. His dad was a lawyer, and his mother eventually headed the United Way in Seattle, Washington. Gates was a reader. He also joined the Boy Scouts and became a hiker, a climber of smaller mountains, and he grew to love the outdoors. His family rented a cabin at place called Cheerio and eventually built a summer home there, shared by his whole family. He was fortunate that his parents came to understand his learning style and sent him to a progressive school. 

Although he did drop out of Harvard before his junior year, he had so many chances to work on rare computer systems, to learn coding, and to do so in an age when computer nerds wanted to get computers to do more (especially in gaming). Gates has two sisters, Kristi and Libby. They were a close and supportive family. Some computer developers may have had to tinker in the garage or the basement, but this is not true for Bill Gates. Quite a while ago I read a biography about Warren Buffet, The Snowball: Warren Buffet and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder. Although Buffet was not a computer guy, his early life is very similar to Bill Gates’ early years. Alas, neither book offers a clear path to financial greatness unless you are cut from the same cloth as these guys. Gates is working on another memoir which begins where this one leaves off.