Source Control

‘Source Code’ is the first volume of Bill Gates’s memoirs, covering his life up to 1978. That means his family, his childhood, his education, and the early years of Microsoft with a particular focus on the development, launch and success of Microsoft’s first product Microsoft BASIC.

Accompanying the book has come the release of the source code for (a version of) the very first Microsoft BASIC running on the Intel 8080-based Altair 8800. I say ‘source code’ but it’s really a (100MB!!) PDF file and is linked to by a flashy landing page on Gates’s website (so flashy that it crashes some web browsers!).

Browsing through The Altair BASIC source code, though, is fascinating.

Gates has left it to others though to convert the PDF’s images into machine readable (and emulator friendly) code and there doesn’t seem to be a successful conversion so far (please let me know if you’ve found one).

As far as I can tell it’s still © Microsoft. Of course, Bill was never a fan of open source.

What to make of ‘Source Code’ the book though? It’s helpful to divide it into two halves. The first is largely about Gates’s family, upbringing, time at school and very earliest dabbling with computers. It ends with the death, in a mountaineering accident in May 1972, of Gates’s close friend Kent Evans.

The second half of the book is about the early years of Microsoft. It’s a story that is already well known, particularly from Paul Allen’s own book, the excellent ‘Idea Man’. As far as I can tell the Gates and Allen accounts are broadly consistent. ‘Source Code’ has more detail though, and of course it has Gates’s own personal perspective on these events, albeit from a distance of around five decades.

There is some technology in the book: discussion of programming on the DEC computers that Gates and Allen got started on, and of course of the Altair. There is greater focus though on the early days of Microsoft as a business and on Gates himself. The book is very much ‘Bill’s story’ with the ‘weight’ of the text focused on his rationale (or perhaps rather justifications) for the - personal and business - decisions he made over this period.

So what can we learn about Gates from the book? Four things stand out.

1.