Bill Gates’s trilogy of memoirs, including his first two decades of his life, from 1955 to the founding of Microsoft and its agreement to supply a version of the basic programming language to Apple Computer in 1977. Once a snotty brat whom everyone loved to hate, now grown up into a beloved elder statesman. Gates Foundation, focuses on unsexy but critical technologies such as malaria nets, “effective altruism”.  His early childhood in the suburbs of Seattle with a lawyer father and a schoolteacher mother. He was fascinated by his grandmother’s skill at card games around the family dining table. Eight-year-old Gates releases Gin rummy and sevens are systems of dynamic data that the player can learn to manipulate. He was a disruptive school child, not wanting to try too hard, until he first learned to use a computer terminal under the guidance of an influential maths teacher Bill Dougall, who been a World War II Navy pilot and worked as an aeronautical engineer at Boeing, with a degree in Frenchy literature from the Sorbonne in Paris, graduate engineer.

Gates’ early life have been worn down with familiarity and are deeply entwined with history of personal computing. In 1968, the school terminal communicates with a mainframe elsewhere, but the 13-year-old Gates’s extraordinary mind developing and discovering a passion for progamming, has taught it to play noughts and crosses, and gets hooked but befriends another pupil, Paul Allen who later introduce him to alcohol and LSD, together they pore over programming manuals deep into the night. Gates plans a vast simulation war game, and forms a Lakeside Programming Group to write a payroll program for local businesses, and later to create software for traffic engineers.  The restless teenager  who discovered the love of coding and computing at the dawn of a new era and felt that “by applying my brain, I could solve even the world’s most complex mysteries”.  They are the first to write software that makes the new PC-like machines useful.  At the age of nine believing he has reached an intellectual par with adults, he decides he no longer needs to accept rules laid down by his parents. His depiction of Kent Evans, a school friend, who tempered his inexhaustible drive by getting him to think about his place in the world, before the famous partnerships with  Allen and Steve Ballmer. By 1969, a PDP-10 computer, following a smooth transition to Harvard which he drops out at the age 20 to devote his energies to Microsoft, the company he stated with his childhood friend Paul Allen. Gates takes classes in maths but also chemistry and the Greek classics. He goes on computers once a new home machine, the Altair, is announced. He and Paul Allen will write its Basic, having decided to call themselves “Micro-Soft”. Gates motto, cheap computers represented a triumph of the masses against the monolithic-corporations and establishment forces that controlled access to computing, and so software was widely shared, or copies among people for free. He wrote in an open letter in 1976, “By stealing software, you prevent good software from being written, Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?”.

By late 1970s, Microsoft, still with only a dozen employees, signed its first deal with Apple. The deals would go on and Microsoft would grow unimaginably. Gates never forgot his mother’s reminder that he as merely a steward of any wealth that he gained. Bill Gates’s Source Code, reveals his unbelievable energy and ambition and to see how he sets himself in the world. The one-time enfant terrible of the tech world, who will hit 70 this year, doesn’t hold back from admitting his shortcomings, starting with an overly developed competitive instinct. His insecurities and sense of his own lack of “coolness” fed a relentless drive to deliver a fast-paced account of the rise from programming prodigy to budding tech mogul.

Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates, Allen Lane £25/Knopf $30, 336 pages.