Source Code

As Source Code traces Bill Gates’s life from his birth in 1955 to the early years of Microsoft in the late 1970s, it also details important cultural changes in mid-century America. The memoir suggests that the shift from post-war prosperity to the revolutions of the 1960s and the idealism 1970s had an important impact on Gates’s life and career. When Gates was born, the United States was a prosperous, forward-thinking nation. He suggests that “the overwhelming feeling in families like [theirs] was confidence” and that “anyone could see that America was booming” (38). He argues that this “climate of limitless potential” inspired his parents to push their children to be the best they could be (41). In these passages, the use of the words “confidence,” “booming,” and “limitless potential” highlights the positivity and promise of American culture in the post-war years, when anything seemed possible.

As Gates grew older, his social world changed as a result of the cultural revolutions of the 1960s. When he started at Seattle’s Lakeside School in 1967, “every teacher was male, except the librarian, and white” (91). Over the next six years, however, “the school would shed the last of its more conservative traditions, abolish its dress code, hire women faculty, and merge with a girls’ school” (91).