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Bill Gates Began the Altair BASIC Code in His Head While Hiking as a Teenager

Friday Bill Gates shared an excerpt from his upcoming memoir Source Code: My Beginnings. Published in the Wall Street Journal, the excerpt includes pictures of young Bill Gates when he was 12 (dressed for a hike) and 14 (studying a teletype machine). Gates remembers forming "a sort of splinter ...

But he also remembers another group of friends — Kent, Rick, and... Paul — who connected to a mainframe computer from a phone line at their private school. Three and a half years later, I was a sophomore in college not sure of my path in life when Paul Allen, one of my Lakeside friends, burst into my dorm room with news of a groundbreaking computer. Gates cites Richard Feynman's description of the excitement and pleasure of "finding the thing out" — the reward for "all of the disciplined thinking and hard work."

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