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.

Source Code,” the first of three planned memoirs by Bill Gates, might end up being the most personal of them: With the next books dedicated to chronicling his career in tech and philanthropy, this one has room to meander through the tech co-founder’s mostly charmed youth in 1960s Seattle.

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 compu