Becoming Bill Gates: A new memoir retraces the road to Microsoft

• ... by Knute Berger / CascadePBS.org 
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• In Source Code: My Beginnings, the first book in a trilogy, the tech giant co-founder reflects on his Seattle upbringing and what — and who — made him.
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On the edge of 70, Bill Gates has written his first memoir, Source Code: My Beginnings. It focuses on his early life, from his Seattle upbringing to the launch of Microsoft as a young Harvard dropout. His book is a personal history of what made Bill Gates rise from school nerd to budding tech mogul. He plans two more volumes to address his adult years, career and controversies.

I went to the same private high school at the same time as Gates, and so I find the book offers an insightful reflection on the Seattle milieu that shaped him.

In the early 1990s I attended a small dinner party on the Eastside. Among the six guests were Gates’ parents — his father Bill Sr. and his mother Mary. Bill Sr. was a successful Seattle attorney: tall, civil and a man who drew quiet respect. His mother was a civic dynamo, highly admired, full of charm. If young Bill put people on edge, Mary put people at ease.

I had recently written a review of a Bill Gates biography for Seattle Weekly. When I was introduced, Mary took my hand and looked in my eye and said, “Oh, I know you.” She had read my review, clipped it and put it in a scrapbook she kept of articles about Bill.

I had made the case in my review that Gates’ story was no Horatio Alger rags-to-riches yarn of a young kid pulling himself up by nothing but his bootstraps. Gates grew up with every advantage. Mary told me over dinner that they had put Bill in private school because they didn’t want him to be bullied in a Seattle public school locker room. Lakeside, Bill’s 7th-12th grade prep school, respected brains more than brawn. 

Source Code underscores in detail these advantages: prosperous parents, life in north Seattle’s mostly white and affluent View Ridge and Laurelhurst neighborhoods, summer frolics at Hood Canal. Mary, who died in 1994, came from a monied banking family and had strong views of a proper upbringing. Much of her son's memoir discusses his rebellions against his mom’s control and the upper-middle-class norms she expected him to follow.

Bill's account of Mary Gates’ strict adherence to conformist traditions, including demanding that the whole family receive and wear matching Christmas pajamas every year, led me to sympathize with her son’s rebellion. His pushback against his parents wasn’t the classic ’60s refrain about dropping out, but more a demand for the freedom to do his own thing. And that thing was something few Laurelhurst parents knew much about: writing computer code.

Bill’s admitted neurodiversity — the spectrum wasn’t really a factor in the child-rearing of the 1950s and 1960s — resulted in family clashes and disruptions. Bill’s parents finally sent him to a U District shrink to find some peace in the family and to understand what was driving their son: headstrong, super-smart, competitive, rude and focused on what he wanted to focus on. The shrink, apparently, told the folks to let young Bill be Bill. 

The Lakeside Mothers’ Club raised money to buy a teletype machine for the school. It was installed in the math department and connected by telephone to an offsite mainframe computer. Students like Gates and Paul Allen, a couple of years older than Gates, could use it at will. When computer use got out of hand, parents helped pay the skyrocketing bills for the computer time. The nerds had the luxury of access. And a cadre of kids who were drawn to the computer hook-up could take the technology wherever it would take them.

The computing room largely took Gates into private enterprise. While still in high school, Bill and his computer chums leveraged their budding expertise to advance their code-writing skills, build real-world business connections and make money.

Another very Northwest facet of Gates’ story is his experience in the outdoors as a Boy Scout and as a young teen going on independent hikes in the wilderness with his buddies. He recounts one expedition hiking in the Olympics over Low Divide Pass to Quinault and back. On that hike, while slogging through the snow, Gates says he had a bit of a breakthrough on how to write software code, which played an important role later in solving a major problem. Wilderness treks gave him confidence, he says. Part of his drive has been to win every challenge he faced.

Gates’ Northwest upbringing and his parents’ commitment to public service — his mother was the national chair of United Way, and both parents were longtime members of the University of Washington’s Board of Regents — are reflected in his values today through establishing the philanthropic Gates Foundation, devoting much of his wealth to improving world health and being a voice for science. The impulsive, driven youth who played a huge role in the computer revolution is more reflective now.

At the end of Source Code, Gates discusses his advantages: “Often success reduces people to stock characters: the boy wonder, the genius engineer, the iconoclastic designer, the paradoxical tycoon. In my case, I’m struck by the set of unique circumstances — mostly out of my control — that shaped my character and career. It’s impossible to overstate the unearned privilege I enjoyed: to be born in the rich United States is a big part of winning the birth lottery ticket, as is being born white and male in a society that advantages white men.” That’s a refreshing take for someone whose image was once synonymous with an upstart “boy genius” who did it on his own.

Gates also happened to be born at the right time to throw himself into an emerging computer revolution, but with age he seems to have realized he didn’t get where he is all by himself. A younger Bill Gates might not have understood that.

Bill Gates, courtesy of Knopf Doubleday 

Knute “Mossback” Berger is an editor-at-large at Cascade PBS.

To view the original article with photos of a young Bill Gates with his parents and siblings and a photo of Bill Gates with Paul Allen working the teletype machine at Lakeside High, visit the following link: https://www.cascadepbs.org/mossback/2025/03/becoming-bill-gates-new-memoir-retraces-road-microsoft

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