The nerdy obsessive who became the world’s richest man

Shortly before Bill Gates’s seventh birthday in 1962, his parents stuffed their son into a button-down shirt and blazer for a visit to Century 21, a bold showcase of scientific prowess in their home town of Seattle. This futuristic fair was intended as the nation’s rebuff to Soviet Russia following the Sputnik satellite launch, which sparked the space race. The family enjoyed the new 600ft Space Needle. They also saw the Mercury capsule that carried the first American into space; Ford’s concept of a six-wheeled nuclear-powered car; and IBM’s idea of a cheap computer, costing $100,000. Best of all in the boy’s view was rattling around on the Wild Mouse Ride, which felt risky and thrilling, stoking a lifelong love of rollercoasters.

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More than six decades later, the technology titan reflects that the Hollywood version of his life story would say how he fell in love with computers at that moment in the IBM Pavilion – as was the case with Paul Allen, another geeky local kid who became Gates’s friend and future partner at Microsoft. Although there was no such Damascene moment for him, Gates admits that the fair’s ‘techno-optimism’ must have affected him:

At that impressionable age, the message in 1962 was so clear: we would explore space, stop disease, travel faster and easier. Technology was progress and, in the right hands, it would bring peace.

That nugget from his autobiography underlines how the determined, nerdy and wilful boy was fortunate to grow up at such a time and place. Gates came of age as computers started to surge in power and crash in price, reshaping society and making him the world’s richest person for more than two decades.