In contrast to the current crop of swaggering tech bros, the Microsoft founder comes across as wry and self-deprecating in this memoir of starting out
Bill Gates is the John McEnroe of the tech world: once a snotty brat whom everyone loved to hate, now grown up into a beloved elder statesman. Former rivals, most notably Apple’s Steve Jobs, have since departed this dimension, while the Gates Foundation, focusing on unsexy but important technologies such as malaria nets, was doing “effective altruism” long before that became a fashionable term among philosophically minded tech bros.
Time, then, to look back. In the first of what the author threatens will be a trilogy of memoirs, Gates recounts the first two decades of his life, from his birth in 1955 to the founding of Microsoft and its agreement to supply a version of the Basic programming language to Apple Computer in 1977.
He grows up in a pleasant suburb of Seattle with a lawyer father and a schoolteacher mother. His intellectual development is keyed to an origin scene in which he is fascinated by his grandmother’s skill at card games around the family dining table. The eight-year-old Gates realises that gin rummy and sevens are systems of dynamic data that the player can learn to manipulate.
As he tells it, Gates was a rather disruptive schoolchild, always playing the smart alec and not wanting to try too hard, until he first learned to use a computer terminal under the guidance of an influential maths teacher named Bill Dougall. (I wanted to learn more about this man than Gates supplies in a still extraordinary thumbnail sketch: “He had been a World War II Navy pilot and worked as an aeronautical engineer at Boeing. Somewhere along the way he earned a degree in French Literature from the Sorbonne in Paris on top of graduate degrees in engineering and education.”)
Ah, the computer terminal. It is 1968, so the school terminal communicates with a mainframe elsewhere. Soon enough, the 13-year-old Gates has taught it to play noughts and crosses. He is hooked. He befriends another pupil, Paul Allen – who will later introduce him to alcohol and LSD – and together they pore over programming manuals deep into the night. Gates plans a vast simulation war game, but he and his friends get their first taste of writing actually useful software when they are asked to automate class scheduling after their school merges with another. Success with this leads the children, now calling themselves the Lakeside Programming Group, to write a payroll program for local businesses, and later to create software for traffic engineers.
The cost savings DOGE has identified less than two weeks into Trump’s second term, however, is not what has impressed the vice president most about the newly-minted department.
A review of this year’s Photo Brussels festival, where the theme of artificial intelligence and its impact and potential were examined by the curated work
Who’s afraid of artificial intelligence? Probably all of us are a little – but the artists at the centre of this year’s Photo Brussels festival have embraced the technology to bring us an intriguing and, at times, optimistic exploration of one of the most concerning developments of our time.
The ambitious curation by the photography academic Michel Poivert gathers together 17 projects at Brussels’ Hangar gallery. Together their creations reveal the visual and intellectual potential, along with the current limits, of this wave of “promptography”.
A city associated with sausage and herring is now a haven for plant-based foods – and Poland’s rightwing politicians aren’t happy
I want to tell you about a relatively typical neighbourhood in my city. There are two vegan sushi restaurants, three vegan ramen spots. There are a few vegan delis. All the convenience stores have a vegan section. There’s an abundance of vegan bakeries. There’s a place that does vegan peking duck – it’s good, I promise. Many of these vegan places proudly have a rainbow flag on display. I’m not talking about Los Angeles or New York. I’m not even talking about Copenhagen. My neighbourhood is called Śródmieście. The vegan paradise I’m talking about – it’s Warsaw.
If you don’t believe me, well, Warsaw has been ranked among the top vegan cities in the world by HappyCow (a vegan ranking website) for the past six years. In 2022, it was National Geographic’s number one vegan city in the world. Maybe your perception of Poland is all kielbasa (sausage) and conservative politics. Herring and hate. It’s more complicated than that. In the past two decades there has been a quiet vegan revolution in the country.
Karol Adamiak is a chef from Warsaw. Barclay Bram contributed research and writing to this article. They cook together as Bracia
From mindful waking in the Yorkshire Dales to a Buddhist retreat in Japan, our tipsters have found inner peace and rejuvenation all over the world
With Eryri national park (Snowdonia) on the doorstep and guided wild swims available, north Wales’ Tawelu Retreats offers options to explore the outdoors or go full hibernation with the retreat’s yoga classes and meditations, plus a sauna and hot tub. The chef cooked up filling, comforting veggie food and gorgeous chai and hot chocolate. Even getting lost running up the Welsh fells and nearly missing my hot shells massage didn’t trouble my stress levels. It’s women only, four days from £650. Laura King
Olivier Dubois, a French journalist, was kidnapped by JNIM, a branch of al-Qaida in Africa's Sahel region, while on his way to interview one of the group's leaders in northern Mali
‘History is littered with democracies that lost their freedoms and didn't notice it while it was happening. Let's not be one of them,’ Adam Schiff says
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