Source Code

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.

“By the time I was in my early teens, my parents had accepted that I was different from many of my peers and had come to terms with the fact that I needed a certain amount of independence in making my way through the world.”

Throughout the novel, Gates presents himself as an outsider among his family and his classmates. Although he initially saw this distance from others as an obstacle to overcome, he later recognized that his differences made him uniquely suited to succeed in business. His parents’ willingness to embrace his independence also speaks to Cultural Changes in Mid-Century America, as parenting styles began to prioritize individuality over conformity.

“In computer science, there’s a thing called a state machine, a part of a program that receives an input, and based on the state of a set of conditions, takes the optimal action. My grandmother had a finely tuned state machine for cards; her mental algorithm methodically worked through probabilities, decision trees, and game theory.”

Gates attributes much of his success to the influence of the women in his life, especially his mother, sister, and grandmother. In this passage, he suggests that his grandmother’s skill as a card player helped her to develop the critical thinking and analysis skills that he would later use to develop revolutionary software. Gates explicitly connects these card lessons to the development of his own analytical skills.

“But to a young kid in View Ridge that wider world felt abstract. […] The overwhelming feeling in families like ours was confidence. Our parents and all the parents around us had been through the Great Depression and World War II. Anyone could see that America was booming.”

This passage directly connects to the theme of cultural changes in mid-century America. Although, as a child, Gates was unaware of the changes that his family and neighborhood were undergoing in the late 1950s and early 1960s, this passage suggests that the wealth and confidence of the post-war years had a profound effect on his early development. The optimism of this era contrasts with the later economic struggles that would define the 1970s,