Microsoft founder Bill Gates explores the making of his internal operating system in new memoir

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With his 70th birthday looming on this year’s horizon, Microsoft founder Bill Gates looked inward to open a window into the man behind Windows and other seminal software that turned the personal computer into a household staple

With his 70th birthday looming on this year's horizon, Microsoft founder Bill Gates looked inward to open a window into the man behind Windows and other seminal software that turned the personal computer into a household staple.

Gates focuses on the first quarter-century of his life in “Source Code: My Beginnings,” the opening installment in a retrospective trilogy about an insouciant, impertinent and often misunderstood kid who grew up to become a polarizing technology titan before morphing into an influential philanthropist.

In “Source Code,” Gates explores how his childhood quirks, upbringing, friendships and experiences coalesced into shaping his own internal operating system. Along the way, he 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 trailblazing 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