“Through my friendship with Kent and Paul and all this computer work, it was kind of obvious to me that we could do a software company, not just a company with a software product like most of our competitors, but a company that would do every kind of software and that we would hire better and have better tools and just move faster than anybody else for this magic ingredient,” added Bill Gates while talking exclusively to ToI.
In “Source Code: My Beginnings,” the first installment of a trilogy retracing his journey from an often misunderstood kid to a polarizing technology titan to an influential philanthropist, Gates dissects his brain’s unusual wiring, delves into the emotional trauma of his best friend dying while they were both in high school, and revisits the birth of Traf-O-Data, a startup that he launched in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with another childhood friend, Paul Allen.
Traf-O-Data, conceived to create software for the groundbreaking Altair computer made Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, became Microsoft in 1975 — a year it booked $16,005 in revenue while Gates and Allen were making $9 per hour.
By 1977, Microsoft had become successful enough to embolden Gates to drop out of Harvard University. In 1979, he had decided to move Microsoft to the Seattle area where he grew up. Although Gates stepped down as Microsoft’s CEO 25 years ago, the Windows operating system and other software created under his reign remain the main pillar in a company that now generates $212 billion in annual revenue, boasts a $3.1 trillion market value, and accounts for most of Gates’ $100 billion personal fortune.“Source Code” ends with Gates’s drive back to Seattle in 1979, meaning it doesn’t touch upon his 1994 marriage to Melinda French, nor their 2021 divorce.
