51 pages • 1-hour read
Source Code
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Chapters 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Lakeside”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.
Gates began seventh grade at Lakeside School, an elite, all-white, college-prep school 20 minutes from his home. The class-clown persona that he cultivated at his public school was not successful at Lakeside, and Gates repeatedly received poor grades. In eighth grade, he became friends with Kent Evans, a fellow outsider who pushed Gates to consider what he really wanted out of life. The boys bonded over their interest in current events and love for camping.
Meanwhile, Lakeside acquired a teletype machine, which allowed students and teachers to have part-time access to a supercomputer in California. Gates quickly became obsessed with the machine, which satisfied his love for problem-solving. The first code that Gates wrote was a tic-tac-toe game; he then developed a more complex lunar-landing game. Gates quickly learned that code writing takes concentration and intention. Because the computer couldn’t infer his meaning or intuit mistakes, he had to be precise with his codes.
Gates was one of many Lakeside students interested in working with the computer. Another was Paul Allen, future co-founder of Microsoft, who secured Gates’s help in solving problems by insisting that Gates wouldn’t be able to. Gates’s naturally competitive nature meant that he wouldn’t stop until he solved the problem. Lakeside’s laissez-faire teaching philosophy allowed the students to explore and fail without consequences, but because they leased access to the computer rather than owning it outright, the program became prohibitively expensive. The program was saved by Monique Rona, mother of a Lakeside student and deputy director of the University of Washington’s computer lab. Along with colleagues at the university, Rona founded the Computer Center Corp, which Gates calls “C-Cubed.” C-Cubed worked with a company called Digital Equipment Corp to test new software, allowing C-Cubed workers to use their terminals for free as long as they reported any bugs found in the software. Gates, Allen, and other students were brought in to experiment with the software and find bugs.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Free Time”
This unrestricted computer time at C-Cubed was foundational for Gates, who often snuck out at night to use the computer. Gates reflects that without that early free-rein experimental time, he might not have pursued a career in computers. Because few computer programming manuals or instructions existed at that time, Gates and Allen were forced to learn through trial and error. Too shy to speak directly to the adult programmers working at C-Cubed directly, the boys picked through the engineers’ trash and reverse-engineered the snippets of code they found. Gates developed more programs, including a realistic war game based on the daily Vietnam War broadcasts.
After eight months, the deal between C-Cubed and Digital Equipment Corp ended, and Gates was no longer allowed direct access to the computers. At the same time, Lakeside began charging families directly for student computer use. Gates and Allen exploited a loophole that allowed them to continue to use the computer for free but were quickly caught. As a result, Gates and Allen were banned from accessing the C-Cubed computers.
Gates devoted his newfound free time to Boy Scouts, joining Troop 186, a group known for taking long camping and hiking trips. He became close friends with a senior named Mike Collier, who invited him to hike the Lifesaving Trail on Vancouver Island, an isolated spot known for stormy weather and shipwrecks. Gates appreciated the democratic nature of these trips, where all opinions were taken seriously, and the group cared for individuals despite their appearance or popularity at school. When he returned to Lakeside, he was disappointed to find that he was not taken seriously by his teachers or classmates. He determined to apply himself in school to earn the freedoms granted to successful Lakeside students like Kent Evans.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Just Kids?”
Gates began ninth grade by buying two copies of all his textbooks: one for school and one for home. Leaving one set of books at school allowed him to maintain the façade that he did not have to work hard or study like his classmates. In reality, he spent his nights poring over his at-home textbooks to improve his grades. Ninth grade was the first year that he got mostly As, reassuring his parents that they made the right decision sending him to Lakeside.
Gates was particularly drawn to science, especially the physics class taught by Dr. Daniel Morris. Dr. Morris challenged Gates’s stereotype of scientists as isolated figures focusing on a single field or problem by redefining science as the challenge of understanding how the world works.
Gates was briefly allowed to return to C-Cubed when Paul Allen secured a job there, working as a programmer. However, after just a few months, the company was forced to close as Seattle experienced a minor financial depression. Gates was unable to finish his war game, which he planned to submit as his final project for history class.
When Lakeside regained access to computers, Gates and Kent Evans seriously considered how they could build careers through programming. They formed an unofficial corporation with Allen called the Lakeside Programming Group, which was hired by a Portland-based computer company to develop a payroll software program. Although the program was initially successful, the group was once again banned from accessing computers after using hardware without asking. As a result, a strong rivalry emerged in the group, with Gates and Evans on one side and Allen and their friend Ric Weiland on another. When Allen and Weiland graduated, Gates and Evans were left to finish the payroll program on their own. Gates was thrilled to find that it worked without the older boys’ help.
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Real World”
With the help of Gates’s father, the Lakeside Programming Group was able to secure free computing time in exchange for the payroll program. While Evans devoted himself to finding new projects for the group to work on, Gates focused on writing a program to help Lakeside administrators create class schedules for the school, which now included girls. The program was successful, and administrators agreed to pay Gates and Evans for their work. Evans immediately recognized the business potential of the program and began promoting it to school systems across Washington state.
In late May 1972, Evans left Seattle for a highly technical camping trip with a group of older climbers. He suffered a fatal accident on Mt. Shuksan, devastating Gates and the rest of the tight-knight Lakeside community. At the memorial service, Evans’s parents offered Gates his programming materials and notes, but Gates was too devastated to accept. Reflecting on their friendship, Gates argues that Evans helped hone his raw intelligence into the motivation and drive that would later lead to his success.
Gates channeled his grief into finishing the class-scheduling software he created with Evans. He asked Allen for help, and they grew closer over the summer as they finished the project. They used the proceeds from the project to buy an Intel microprocessor for $360, about $2,400 in today’s money. Allen speculated that the microprocessor would allow them to work on future projects, such as a city contract to track the flow of traffic through major intersections. In hindsight, Gates identifies this purchase as the beginning of what would become Microsoft.
Chapters 5-8 Analysis
In this section of Source Code, Gates’s childhood friend Kent Evans is introduced as a major figure in his life. The memoir’s introduction to Evans makes it clear that Gates was deeply influenced by his friend’s drive and ambition, describing “a fearlessness that would manifest itself again and again in the too-short time [he] knew him” (94). This passage foreshadows that, despite Evans’s profound influence on Gates, their relationship was not long-lived. Gates builds tension by emphasizing the importance of their friendship while also hinting at its inevitable end. Gates’s description of their friendship stresses the intensity of their relationship: He writes that they “became best friends very quickly” and “were inseparable” from the moment they met (97). Gates notes that, from the beginning of their friendship, Evans’s “ambition would help spark [his] and channel [his] prodigious competitive drive” (98). The use of the verbs “spark” and “channel” in these passages suggests that Evans had an active influence on Gates’s early desire to pursue computer programming and take his studies seriously, highlighting the theme of The Value of Rivalry in Innovation.
Even as he highlights the importance of their relationship, Gates includes hints that he and Evans would not be lifelong friends in the way that Gates and Paul Allen were. In his introduction to Evans, Gates writes that “he seemed certain he was destined for great things and just had to figure out the best of the many paths to achieve them” (97). Combined with his reference to the “too-short time” the boys were friends (94), this passage hints that Gates was unable to watch his friend achieve his goals. Later in this section of the memoir, Gates says that the end of the friendship was due to personal conflicts. Gates admits that although he and Allen “considered [them]selves friends, there was a lot of competitiveness and pettiness in the ways [they] related” (142), suggesting that these competing personalities may have led to the demise of their friendship. When the boys formed Lakeside Programming Group, Evans “demanded that he and [Gates] be equal” (143), resulting in further tension among the friend group, which “came to a head later that same week” when Gates accused Evans of a lack of drive (148). These passages build tension in the memoir by suggesting that personality differences drove the friends apart.
Ultimately, Gates reveals that the friendship ended when Evans died in a tragic mountaineering accident in 1972. In his description of Evans’s death, Gates again emphasizes Evans’s influence on his life and work ethic. He reflects that Evans’s “optimism about what he—and [Gates]—could accomplish” inspired him to pursue computer programming before that was a viable career path (166). He argues that Evans “helped give [him] direction, setting [him] on the course of defining who [he] wanted to become” (166). This passage ties into the theme of The Importance of Exploration in Education, as Evan’s belief in personal ambition and limitless potential mirrors the experimental, student-led learning that Gates later experienced at Lakeside and Harvard.
Gates’s emphasis on Evan’s influence is especially significant given the fact that the two were also close to Allen, Gates’s future Microsoft co-founder. By highlighting Evans’s influence, Gates also downplays the influence of Allen, with whom he had a notorious rivalry that lasted throughout their careers. This subtle contrast between Evans and Allen suggests that Gates sees Evans as the friend who shaped his personal ambition, while Allen primarily shaped his professional trajectory.
This section of Source Code helps to add depth to Gates’s personality by suggesting that he was a rebel and a rule breaker. When he was granted access to computers at C-Cubed, he began sneaking out of his home at night in order to spend more time on the computer. He acknowledges that, despite the fact that his parents had become more lenient, “they would not have allowed their thirteen-year-old son out that late at night” (112). Gates’s willingness to go against his parents’ wishes suggests that he was more rebellious than readers, who know him only as a successful businessman and philanthropist, may believe. Later, when the boys’ access to computing was cut off, Gates and Allen “discovered a flaw” that allowed them to “log in as an administrator” and access the entire system (118). Although the administrative login allowed them to “reboot the whole system or shut it down,” Gates and Allen used the login “to access free computer time” (119). Again, this rule-breaking streak adds depth to Gates’s character by showing that he is not as strait-laced as readers may believe. However, the fact that Gates and Allen simply used the login to access more time suggests that their primary concern was not rebellion but pursuing their passion for computer programming. This behavior also reflects the changing culture of the early computing world—Gates and Allen were part of a generation that saw computers as tools of personal exploration, rather than just corporate or government resources. This shift in mindset reflects the theme of Cultural Changes in Mid-Century America, as the democratization of computing paved the way for the personal computer revolution.
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