Source Code: My Beginnings

Great read. Nerve really interested in biographies but this has a great storyline and comic parts of his younger years. Amazing how the company started.

Home computers were becoming popular in the last years of my undergraduate studies. During those early years, there were many different software programs competing for dominance. Those were heady days. Because of the emergence of Microsoft’s operating system, MS-DOS and then Windows, and its office programs of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, computer enthusiasts like me were familiar with Bill Gates. Although I knew bits and pieces of Bill Gates’s background, I did not have a complete picture. In his book Source Code, Bill Gates paints an intimate portrait of his childhood to his early Microsoft days. Because I knew that Gates was and is an avid reader, I expected his book to be beautifully written. It is rich with detail with some wry humor sprinkled throughout. Of course, he has a team of dedicated professionals who ensured his book would meet the mark. I have always respected Gates’s many accomplishments and thought he was an interesting person, even more so when he decided to spend his later years pursuing philanthropic endeavors. Although my feelings and our shared era of emerging computer technology may have colored my reading of his book, his book made him appear more human, more like the rest of us, because he shares details with his readers of his friendships and some of his mistakes. And Gates is the first to point out that he was fortunate with his upbringing and educational opportunities. That said, with his drive, ambition, and focus, he was destined to be successful in whatever path he chose. Gates’s memoir stands out as one of the best autobiographies that I have read. I cannot wait for his next two books in his memoir series, the first that is focused on his years of running Microsoft and the second that is focused on his life now as a philanthropist.

Source Code is a really nice autobiography on the formative years of Bill Gates. He focuses on his childhood and the characteristics of his family and takes the reader on the journey through his life as the world moving into the electronic age. One gets a picture of the world changing in real time and one of the most important innovators of that age through his own experiences. It comes across as honest and earnest and though I typically don't read autobiographies I am glad I read this to understand better the climate of the time in the early computer age. Bill Gates is obviously an icon of a monumental era and though he will inevitably have people who like and dislike him the perspective from his own words should be something of interest to a wide audience. The book does not focus on Microsoft in its later life nor anything regarding the company in the last 25 years but as the title suggests focuses on Bill Gates's personal story that led to the founding of Microsoft. One does see that he came from a hardworking and honest family that increased in its privilege through the fathers career progression as a lawyer, he was to benefit from having a father of such stature at times when Bill was under the microscope later. One gets an understanding of his fortune in having a school with early access to compute power and how he and his closest friends including Paul Allen took unique advantage of this to become experts in an immensely growing space by perseverance and passion. Bill tells his story as a kid who was talented with raw intelligence for whom maturity grew with time, but his drive in high school becomes very clear to the reader as his passion was not only for programming and computers but also for the commercial enterprise that was growing on the back of it. The book goes into how he and his close knit group were writing software for enterprises while still in high school and how their managing to get access to computer time was critical to their growth. He talks about his experience in high school and his access to great and supportive teachers that led to his acceptance to Harvard. One gets the first hand story of Harvard and why he eventually left which really brings the reader in to the way driven entrepreneurs saw the world at critical junctures. The whole book makes on sympathetic to the life choices of Bill Gates and brings him rightful admiration for being excellent and driven at a critical juncture. Many parts of Microsoft's story will be there on Wikipedia but the first hand account of how Bill met some critical early joiners, why they joined, what were their talents, how did the group get along, what drove each of their interests is all very helpful in making sense of the story of Microsoft. Having read two different biography type books recently of tech moguls, one a biography (of Jensen Huang and Nvidia) and this autobiography of Bill's formative years, I am glad I read both. It is enjoyable to read and brings Bill Gates down to earth and shows his honesty, early intelligence and brings the reader to sympathize with the path taken and experiences that drove the decision making. Definitely a nice book to check out if one has some spare time

Good read and I learned more about Gates.

If you didn't live in the Altair era (or even if you did!) this book was tremendously enjoyable and educational. I knew Bill to some extent. I interacted with him during his book two era as a leading analyst with Gartner Group (aka Gartner Inc.) I was several years older than Bill but I also lived through the Altair desktop computer era. That era drove me to change careers, moving from academia (Brain Sciences) to Digital Equipment in 1977, where I stayed until 1994 when I joined Gartner as an analyst. This book explains much of the riddle of Bill Gates -- family, upbringing (self upbringing), education and early entrepreneurship. I remember vividly visiting him and Steve Balmer in Bill's Camp GaveAway (was that the name?) on the Hood Canal for a couple of days. I was with a group of 12 to 15 industry analysts invited to share thoughts with Bill. Gates had this tremendous nervous energy, constantly shaking his legs when sitting and thinking. I still have my copy of the group picture from that meeting. Go read volume 1, "Source Code: My Beginnings" to understand where and how he evolved, grew, and developed into the genius who ran Microsoft. Volume 1 has many valuable stories. The Altair story is what drove me to switch, at age 28, into computer industry. (I can't wait to get volumes 2 and 3. How do I get an advance copy? )

To those of us who have followed Microsoft and Bill Gates since the dawn of the personal computer age (and unto its death) most of this story is already known. Still, its nice to get the story from the "source". Mr. Gates writes in a simple forthright style that makes for pleasant listening, and I found myself enjoying the entire tale. For those of us born in the fifties, it is also a nostalgic glance at a world that has largely disappeared. A few of the reviews have criticized the detailed accounts of the card games with his family (especially his grandmother) but if you are looking for clues to the secret of his success, the keen competitive spirit that was instilled in him at an early age explains a lot. I appreciated Gate's acknowledging the fortuitous time (post WWII) , place (the United States) and genes (white male) that played into his life, but while many others (including myself) had the same advantages, the results were hardly the same. I give this book 5 stars because it has been some time since I have had such a pleasant read. The narrator also did a nice job, and it was easy to lapse into believing I was listening to Gate's himself (he did narrate the prologue and epilogue, which made nice bookends).

Great book.

For some, Harvard is thought of as THE premier institution, a place to which many of the absolute best students fail to gain admission. One has to ask: Who, after gaining admission to such a prestigious institution, would voluntarily drop out to start a business in a nascent industry? And what type of person would have the foresight, prerequisite skills, self-confidence, business acumen and risk-taking mindset to pull it all off successfully? This book ends in December 1978, just a couple months after Bill Gates turned 23, with Microsoft still in its infancy. (For perspective, internal IBM proposals to develop its own microcomputer only began in the summer of 1979. IBM subsequently released their Model 5051, aka the “IBM PC”, in August 1981.) I think Bill Gates wrote this book to explain to others (and perhaps himself, since in the Epilogue Bill wrote “Piecing together memories helps me better understand myself”) how he had the capability and personality to start Microsoft at such a young age. So, how well does the book itself work? There are five main phases to this book: ancestry and youth, middle school, junior high, high school and college. As one might expect, the book gets more interesting as time progresses. Most any biography includes a brief section on the subject’s parents (and perhaps grandparents). I suspect autobiographies spend more pages talking about their ancestry (than just biographies do) simply because the subjects are is so personal to the author. Still, it is hard to ever make these sections that interesting to the average reader. Similarly, writing about one’s time in middle school is problematic at best. Trying to write about how you differentiated yourself from other middle schoolers, when typical middle schoolers hardly know who they themselves are, makes self-evaluation tricky. But for junior high, Bill switched to a new school. And when that school added a computer lab for student experimentation, we saw a small number of students develop an intense (if not nearly insane) drive to understand and create. This is the point where Bill Gates merged his intelligence, drive and concentration with a subject that truly interested him. This is the point where, for me, the book got much more interesting – and stayed interesting for the remainder of the book. Bottom Line: Interesting origin history of Microsoft and Bill Gates’ unique contribution to it. FYI: The book says “all profits from Source Code will be donated to United Way Worldwide”.

Gates's recollections of his early years and the bizarre cast of micro computing pioneers make for a fascinating read. He is refreshingly honest about his own weaknesses and does not use this memoir to settle any scores or tear down his rivals.

Tutto ok

Excelente calidad tanto del libro físico y su contenido.

Insightful and Interesting ! ◡̈

Very interesting book !