Bill Gates' exclusive interview with NDTV.
About two hours from Los Angeles, Palm Springs is a desert resort city - arid and beautiful with the San Jacinto mountains as a scenic backdrop.
Bill Gates has a home here, within an upscale Golf and Resort Community.
In early January, the Microsoft co-founder met me in Palm Springs, a short drive from his home, for what would be a very personal, intense conversation on a project very dear to his heart - Source Code: My Beginnings - part one of what may end up being a three-part memoir.
In Source Code, the most intimate look at his growing up years, Bill Gates makes an astonishing statement - ''If I were growing up today, I probably would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum. In the time of my childhood, the fact that some people's brains process information differently from others wasn't widely understood.''
I asked the billionaire philanthropist if he was willing to speak some more on this intensely private part of this life. ''I still rock [my legs] a bit, which is kind of characteristic of, they call it self-stimulation. So, you know, I have to catch myself because it can make people nervous if I'm sitting doing that. So, no, I don't think it ever goes away. It'd be harder to diagnose now because it's less acute and I've learned, you know, how to shape my behaviour.''
Autism encompasses a range of symptoms, including difficulties with social interaction, repetitive actions, heightened or reduced sensory responses, and distinctive cognitive traits. Every individual is impacted in different ways. Some may exhibit exceptional abilities in some domains.
For Bill Gates, autism meant being hyper-focused, result-oriented and, in his early days, being willing to code on first-generation PCs for days on end, to the point where he fell asleep with exhaustion.
''Well, I knew there was something different. I give the example that they asked us in sixth grade to write a report, and I picked a small United States state called Delaware. You know, I ended up turning in a 200-page report, and the other kids were turning in five to 10-page reports. And I was kind of embarrassed. Wow, you know, did I go nuts over this thing? You know, teachers were always a little confounded at where I was so capable and also yet so distracted. You know, I literally had teachers at one stage say to me, we should skip you ahead one or two grades, or a teacher say, no, we should hold you back so you can be more mature.''
Computing, for Gates, was a means to feed his focus and his drive to achieve tangible results. Early generation code using BASIC (Beginner's All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was one of the most impactful programming languages for personal computers through the seventies. The outcomes of writing thousands of lines of code were brutal - you either hit a homerun (software which worked), or you went back to the drawing board if the code crashed.
''I was lucky enough to be exposed, starting with the terminal when I was 13 at Lakeside High School, the private school I was lucky enough that my parents sent me to. I was given a chance to write and then various people tell me, 'okay, that's really good or that's not good enough.' And so, I had thousands of hours of it and I loved it because it had this sense of correctness, of purity that you immediately know, did you have it right?''
For a large part of his early years, Gates struggled with interpersonal relationships in school while enjoying an extremely close relationship with his parents and grandparents. ''My social skills, particularly with people my own age, other than a few nerdy boys like me, were very slow to develop. And so I had, you know, the advantages of kind of that intense focus, but some of the deficits as well. And, you know, it befuddled my parents and teachers a little bit.''
Friendships, when they did happen, were intense.
''At the beginning of eighth grade, I started noticing this certain kid at the lower school. He was hard to miss. Tall, with unruly brown hair, Kent Evans had a deep cleft lip and spoke with a slight impediment. Later I would learn that as a baby, his lip and palate were so badly deformed Kent's parents had to feed him with an eyedropper,'' says Gates. ''Looking back now, I think those earlier challenges helped seed a fearlessness that would manifest itself again and again in the too-short time I knew him.''
Kent Evans was Bill Gates' closest confident in school, a partner-in-crime, a supporter who always had his back. There are 182 references to Kent Evans in the book.
Gates' life came crashing down when he lost Kent.
''I retreated into myself watching a slideshow in my mind's eye, taking through images of recent days, grasping for evidence that what I had heard wasn't true. He died tragically,'' he says in Source Code.
"My childhood really only had this one traumatic event in it. I'd had grandparents die, but at a pretty old age. And I'd never even contemplated the idea that somebody close to me, not to mention my very best friend, would just be killed,'' says Gates. ''It was just so shocking, you know, the headmaster called me up, made sure my parents were with me. But I had a few months there where I was just so taken aback that life could have that uncertainty.''
Ironically, Kent Evans had died in a hiking accident. Gates was an avid hiking fan himself. In fact, Source Code begins with his account of hiking in the mountains around Seattle, Washington. These were memorable adventures with a splinter group from the Boy Scouts that explored wilderness, occasionally going on expeditions lasting days.
''I wasn't a particularly good hiker. I was the least enthusiastic of the group. Whenever there was a vote of, OK, how far should we go? When should we go home? I was like, go home now,'' says Gates. It was on one of these hikes that he had an idea that would transform his life. And the world of computing.
''On one particularly gruelling day, I thought about a pretty complex piece of this basic interpreter I came up with [and] was thrilled with kind of an elegant solution. And so even though it's like four years later when I finally say, oh my goodness, this first personal computer is coming out, I was able to go back and write this part really quickly because I had thought it through on that hike.''
Gates was referring to the idea for a BASIC interpreter for the MITS Altair 8800 computer. This would eventually become the first product launched by Microsoft. This would, in turn, evolve into various versions of Microsoft BASIC.
But perhaps the most definitive relationship in his life would be with Paul Allen, who he eventually co-founded Microsoft with.
In Source Code, Gates describes first meeting Allen when he was in 7th grade. Allen's curiosity and intelligence had a profound impact. It was Allen, two years older than Gates, who introduced him to the world of computing at Lakeside School. The relationship evolved - there was moments of resentment, anger, and competitiveness but ultimately a camaraderie and brotherhood that, in later years, would get the two men to work together to form Microsoft, the company that has come to define personal computing.
''Sometimes our arguments were where we came up with our best ideas. So it was a great relationship. But, you know, the truth is it had its ups and downs. I think all these intense business partnerships do. The dynamic between Paul and me had always been complicated, a blend of love and rivalry, similar to how brothers might feel.''
Through their teens and early twenties, Gates and Allen were inseparable. ''He was the one who decided I should get drunk one night. He decided I should smoke pot. I mean, he definitely was a more experienced person. But, you know, the dynamism of, okay, how do you, you know, build the company and do all these other things? You know, he counted on me that I had this kind of, hey, I can figure all that stuff out attitude. And, you know, he helped with all the strategy.''
Of the most consequential decisions Bill Gates made at the age of just 19 was to drop out of Harvard after Allen showed him an article in the Popular Electronics magazine on the potential for software in personal computing. While Harvard did influence Gates' broader ideas on philosophy and economics, it was not a source of inspiration for his entrepreneurial ventures.
''Paul and I were totally aligned on the vision to create the leading PC software maker,'' writes Gates in Source Code.
''That goal was like a prize we could glimpse on the other side of a river. But it was clear to me by the end of 1976 that the ambition to be the first to get there-to be the fastest to build the best bridge to the other side-was stronger in me than it was in him. Like one of those watertight hatches on a submarine, I could shut out the rest of the world. Driven by the sense of responsibility I felt for Microsoft, I had closed the hatch door and locked the wheel. No girlfriend, no hobbies. My social life centered around Paul, Ric, and the people we worked with. It was the one way I knew to stay ahead. And I expected similar dedication from the others. We had this huge opportunity in front of us. Why wouldn't you work eighty hours a week in pursuit of it? Yes, it was exhausting, but it was also exhilarating.''
Source Code concludes shortly after the creation of Microsoft.
Microsoft, created by Gates and Allen initially in a 60-40 split of the equity in favour of Gates, came to revolutionise computing by introducing Microsoft BASIC, which became the global standard for personal computer programming languages in the 1970s and 1980s. This made software development accessible to a wider audience. Microsoft's development of MS-DOS and later Windows operating systems standardized personal computer interfaces, greatly enhancing user-friendliness and driving the adoption of personal computers at home and across businesses. Using strategic partnerships, particularly with IBM, Microsoft transformed the software industry, setting the stage for the software defined environment that we have today.
''There were some fine companies, you know, products like VisiCorp with a spreadsheet, Lotus with 1-2-3, Word Perfect, Word Pro. Most of these names, a lot of people haven't heard of nowadays, but there were a lot of very good single product software companies. But we were able to outrun them. And my sense of, you know, let's not slow down probably helped us stay ahead and, even take those single product categories and take a leading position.''
