Opening up the early Gates.

In an age of tech tycoons with obvious faults in their moral hard drives, a more human picture is painted in Bill Gates’s memoir Source Code: My Beginnings’, finds Martin Chilton

- Martin Chilton

Bill Gates, a man who revolutionised world technology, turns 70 in October. In Source Code: My Beginnings - the first instalment in a planned memoir trilogy - he looks back on his early years, from his birth in Seattle to the foundation of Microsoft in the 1970s.

Gates offers insight into his family, painting an affectionate, admiring portrait of his father – despite the fact that the 6ft 7in lawyer occasionally “spanked” him and once emptied a glass of water in his face. His mother, meanwhile, is depicted as virtuous, albeit peculiar. She kept notes every Christmas so that she could make a plan on how to “improve upon it” the following year. Both parents were concerned by their extremely bright, reclusive young son.

Gates details his love of reading from an early age, recalling his lack of interest in most social interactions. Reading this, my immediate thought is that he may be neurodivergent, something he suspects himself in the epilogue: “If I were growing up today, I probably would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum.”

He was small for his age, “shy” and obviously not one of the “cool kids”. He was also self-conscious about his “Barbie-blond hair” and “unusually high-pitched squeaky voice”, referring to the latter no fewer than three times while offering the maudlin revelation that the female speech expert hired to train him in a “big daddy-bear voice” referred to him as “retarded”. But Gates skirts over his being bullied – and notably also over his childhood growing up in a segregated Seattle.