Standing atop Silicon Valley in the 1990s, Bill Gates still felt his perch to be precarious. Objectively, he was set for life. The Microsoft founder had inordinate power in the tech world “attract[ing] admiration and fear in equal measure,

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.

The first in a planned trilogy of books about his life, Source Code covers Gates' remarkable childhood in Seattle, his brief stint at Harvard, and the early years of “Micro-soft” in Albuquerque. This is not the behind-the-scenes story of today’s trillion-dollar tech giant.