Bill Gates reflects on his youth in new memories, “source code”: NPR

Bill Gates tends to look to the future.

In the early 1970s, he envisaged a future of personal mass computers. Today, his work revolves around other initiatives, such as the future of global health. Even his books tend to be on how to sail in the imaginary future – a published in 1995 was entitled The upcoming road. But now, in a new memory, he looks back over time.

“It is only because I was 70 years old this year, and Microsoft was 50 years old, that I decided, ok maybe it’s time to look back,” he declared at NPR Well -considered.

The doors channeled this reflective mood in Source code: my beginnings, The first episode of an autobiography in two parts. He describes, in detail, adolescence and early life of the adult of one of the most consecutive entrepreneurs in America.

The doors recently sat with Well -considered The host Scott Detrow at the NPR headquarters to talk about a variety of subjects: sneak in the computer laboratory in the middle of the night in adolescence; How he and the co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen, exceeded the IT industry established as young people arriving; And its reflections on the current state of global health initiatives while the Trump administration takes office.

See the complete video of their above conversation and the protruding facts of the radio broadcast below.

This interview was slightly modified for length and clarity.

Strengths of the interview

Scott Detrow: What do you think of the person you were as a pre-adolescent, in adolescence? Because there is a lot of time in this book where you write on this subject, and sometimes you write with regret or embarrassment, or reflectivity, but it is also clear that many of these traits have helped you to become who you were on the line as an adult.

Bill Gates: I mean, I blush, thinking about the way I could be abrasive or, you know, things like where I said to my teacher when he was wrong and turned out that I was completely wrong. You know, I wanted to remove this from my chest because I have always felt bad about it. And he was very kind when I spoke to him recently.

Stroke: The thing I thought about reading this is that I wonder what you think of the idea, as what part of this path to success is reproducible in 2025? Because on the one hand, you created this industry around you in the moment. You are in the right place at the right time. The industry is exponentially exponentially. But on the other hand, there is like this level of freedom that a teenager may have to sneak through the code at two in the morning, then to like to mount the bus to another city. And the sensitive infrastructure of the code, like. As if it looks like something type of film Ferris Bueller where, just as clearly, no teenager could do it today. Like, this is reproducible these days?

Gates: There is no doubt that children are more subject to restrictions. Even the hike I did where my parents did not know where we were. This is not how I raise children. We were much tighter. And there is a repression on this subject because you do not ripen the same way. You cannot make the same mistakes. You know, I still think there will be incredible entrepreneurs, you know, companies like Nvidia. But I was lucky that Paul Allen, I saw personal IT and the role of software and almost no one else did. Even large companies, especially IBM, have not seen what we have seen. So you still have when you have a lot of companies, you have to find a defect in their reflection. Yeah. And so it would be more difficult today.

Stroke: Do you remember the moment when you and the other children in the computer laboratory have made you, okay, in the next 20 years, everyone will have a computer? Like, do you remember when it clicked in place? How will it happen?

Gates: Yes, when I helped Paul find a job in Boston and moved my second year, we already wrote that there would be a computer on each desk and in each house. And it has become a kind of Microsoft founding slogan. In fact, we added the words running the Microsoft software, which was sort of the egocentric room. And I was going to the teachers and said, look at, IT will become free because of this exponential improvement. And, you know, we involve reflection. And people have not seen it. This kind of us surprised us, but that’s what gave us the advantage. You know, Paul wanted to do personal computers. I said, no, no, let’s just do the software part. And then when the first kid’s first computer comes out, it was then that I know how to be on the ground floor of the Revolution. We were waiting for that. I had to give up.

Stroke: Why do you think it was a group of children who saw him so clearly? And the teachers and large companies and all existing infrastructure have not really seen it in the same way as you.

Gates: Well, once you have your state of mind that computers are these rare and costly things and spent your time thinking about how you make them a little more effective and a little cheaper when someone One who is young and who has not been there can say, wait a minute, exponential improvement. You know, it is the flea industry often in California, Intel and in the IT industry, both IBM and mini-ruling companies that are mainly in the Boston region, they don’t really follow this. I mean, Paul and I, at the minute when the 8080 chip was announced in 1973, Paul, he said to me, is it good enough? And I said, Paul, this thing is better than the most popular mini-computer, which was a machine of $ 20,000. And so we were like, Wow, how is it that not everyone is his mind is not blowing? You know, when we present ourselves and call the company with this computer, you know, they were surprised.

The Gates Foundation is an NPR financial supporter.