{"id":17555,"date":"2025-01-31T08:37:15","date_gmt":"2025-01-31T07:37:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/31\/source-code-my-beginnings-by-bill-gates-review-refreshingly-frank\/"},"modified":"2025-01-31T08:37:15","modified_gmt":"2025-01-31T07:37:15","slug":"source-code-my-beginnings-by-bill-gates-review-refreshingly-frank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/31\/source-code-my-beginnings-by-bill-gates-review-refreshingly-frank\/","title":{"rendered":"Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates review \u2013 refreshingly frank"},"content":{"rendered":"

In contrast to the current crop of swaggering tech bros, the Microsoft founder comes across as wry and self-deprecating in this memoir of starting out<\/p>\n

Bill Gates is the John McEnroe of the tech world: once a snotty brat whom everyone loved to hate, now grown up into a beloved elder statesman. Former rivals, most notably Apple\u2019s Steve Jobs, have since departed this dimension, while the\u00a0Gates Foundation, focusing on unsexy\u00a0but important technologies such as malaria nets, was doing \u201ceffective altruism\u201d long before that became a fashionable term among philosophically minded tech bros.<\/p>\n

Time, then, to look back. In the first of what the author threatens will be a\u00a0trilogy of memoirs, Gates recounts the first two decades of his life, from his birth in 1955 to the founding of Microsoft and its agreement to supply a version of the Basic programming language to Apple Computer in 1977.<\/p>\n

He grows up in a pleasant suburb of\u00a0Seattle with a lawyer father and a schoolteacher mother. His intellectual development is keyed to an origin scene in which he is fascinated by his grandmother\u2019s skill at card games around the family dining table. The eight-year-old Gates realises that gin rummy and sevens are systems of dynamic data that the player can learn\u00a0to manipulate.
\n As he tells it, Gates was a rather disruptive schoolchild, always playing the smart alec and not wanting to try too hard, until he first learned to use a computer terminal under the guidance of an influential maths teacher named Bill Dougall. (I wanted to learn more about this man than Gates supplies in a still extraordinary thumbnail sketch: \u201cHe had been a World War II Navy pilot and worked as an aeronautical engineer at Boeing. Somewhere along the way he earned a degree in French Literature from the Sorbonne in Paris on top of graduate degrees in engineering and education.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Ah, the computer terminal. It is 1968, so the school terminal communicates with a mainframe elsewhere. Soon enough, the 13-year-old Gates has taught it to\u00a0play noughts and crosses. He is hooked. He befriends another pupil, Paul Allen \u2013 who will later introduce him to alcohol and LSD \u2013 and together they pore over programming manuals deep into the night. Gates plans a vast simulation war game, but he and his friends get their first taste of writing actually useful software when they are asked to automate class scheduling after their school merges with another. Success with this leads the children, now calling themselves the Lakeside Programming Group, to write a payroll program for local businesses, and later to create software for traffic engineers.<\/p>\n

Continue reading…<\/a>
\nIn contrast to the current crop of swaggering tech bros, the Microsoft founder comes across as wry and self-deprecating in this memoir of starting out
\nBill Gates is the John McEnroe of the tech world: once a snotty brat whom everyone loved to hate, now grown up into a beloved elder statesman. Former rivals, most notably Apple\u2019s Steve Jobs, have since departed this dimension, while the\u00a0Gates Foundation, focusing on unsexy\u00a0but important technologies such as malaria nets, was doing \u201ceffective altruism\u201d long before that became a fashionable term among philosophically minded tech bros.
\n Time, then, to look back. In the first of what the author threatens will be a\u00a0trilogy of memoirs, Gates recounts the first two decades of his life, from his birth in 1955 to the founding of Microsoft and its agreement to supply a version of the Basic programming language to Apple Computer in 1977.
\nHe grows up in a pleasant suburb of\u00a0Seattle with a lawyer father and a schoolteacher mother. His intellectual development is keyed to an origin scene in which he is fascinated by his grandmother\u2019s skill at card games around the family dining table. The eight-year-old Gates realises that gin rummy and sevens are systems of dynamic data that the player can learn\u00a0to manipulate.
\n As he tells it, Gates was a rather disruptive schoolchild, always playing the smart alec and not wanting to try too hard, until he first learned to use a computer terminal under the guidance of an influential maths teacher named Bill Dougall. (I wanted to learn more about this man than Gates supplies in a still extraordinary thumbnail sketch: \u201cHe had been a World War II Navy pilot and worked as an aeronautical engineer at Boeing. Somewhere along the way he earned a degree in French Literature from the Sorbonne in Paris on top of graduate degrees in engineering and education.\u201d)
\n Ah, the computer terminal. It is 1968, so the school terminal communicates with a mainframe elsewhere. Soon enough, the 13-year-old Gates has taught it to\u00a0play noughts and crosses. He is hooked. He befriends another pupil, Paul Allen \u2013 who will later introduce him to alcohol and LSD \u2013 and together they pore over programming manuals deep into the night. Gates plans a vast simulation war game, but he and his friends get their first taste of writing actually useful software when they are asked to automate class scheduling after their school merges with another. Success with this leads the children, now calling themselves the Lakeside Programming Group, to write a payroll program for local businesses, and later to create software for traffic engineers. Continue reading…Technology | The Guardian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In contrast to the current crop of swaggering tech bros, the Microsoft founder comes across as wry and self-deprecating in this memoir of starting out Bill Gates is the John McEnroe of the tech world: once a snotty brat whom everyone loved to hate, now grown up into a beloved elder statesman. Former rivals, most …<\/p>\n

Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates review \u2013 refreshingly frank<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":17556,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17555"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17555\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}