Before he left Harvard University to co-found Microsoft, Bill Gates had the option to drop out and take a job with any of the multiple tech companies that made him offers when he was just 18 years old.

Gates now says those job offers from notable companies like Honeywell and General Electric provided a major “ego boost.” The offers proved to Gates that he was cut out for a career in computer programming, but actually accepting any of them might have also steered him away from the path that would later turn him into a billionaire and Microsoft into a $3 trillion behemoth.

This period in Gates’ life is covered in his new memoir, “Source Code,” which was published earlier this month and includes details from the future billionaire’s childhood through the early days of Microsoft.

Gates was a freshman at Harvard when he started typing out a resume to test the interest of potential tech employers. Gates detailed the programming work he and his high school friends had done for Seattle-area tech companies, including a traffic flow analysis program he’d developed “in partnership with Paul G. Allen,” his future Microsoft co-founder, he wrote in the book.

“I listed every computer I had worked on, and every major program I had written,” he wrote, adding that he remembers thinking: “I wasn’t that serious about finding a job, but maybe something interesting would happen if I tried.”

At the time, Allen was “languishing” at Washington State University and contemplating dropping out to work full-time, Gates writes. Allen tried convincing Gates to forgo college and start a business together, but Gates was reluctant to skip out on his education and wanted to wait for further advancements in personal computer technology, he says. 

Instead, Gates writes that he “floated the idea” of Allen moving to Boston so they could brainstorm in person about their future plans, and possibly even get tech jobs to earn cash that would make it easier to fund their own side business in the future. 

“We could both work in Boston as programmers or systems administrators, jobs that would give us access to computers, income and time to work on a side project,” Gates writes in his book. However, he also noted that “leaving college and hurling yourself into the job market was a dicey prospect.”

The first company to respond to Gates’ application for employment was Maynard, Massachusetts-based Digital Equipment Corporation, which made the PDP-10 computers Gates had learned to write code on back in Seattle.

The company rolled out the red carpet for the young Gates, flying him to DEC headquarters from Boston in his first-ever helicopter ride, which he writes was “cool enough” even if he hadn’t received a job offer.

The chance to tour DEC’s headquarters and meet some of the engineers who created the same software programs Gates had spent hours on “was the closest thing for me at that age to visiting Mecca,” he writes.

“At DEC I was awed by everyone I met and basked in the feeling that I was valued for skills I had been honing for so long,” he adds in the book.

It was such a positive experience that Gates genuinely “felt bad” when he turned down DEC’s “incredibly flattering” job offer, he writes. In fact, Gates says he turned down “a few other offers” before returning to Harvard for his sophomore year, including a role as a programmer at General Electric’s appliance factory in Kentucky. While Gates also turned down a job in Honeywell’s computers division, Allen signed on to work there as a programmer in Boston in the summer of 1974.

It would only be a few months later when Allen burst into Gates’ Harvard dorm room carrying a copy of Popular Electronics that featured “the world’s first minicomputer,” an Altair 8800, on the magazine’s cover. That breakthrough finally convinced Gates it was time to put his studies on hold and start a software business with Allen. They incorporated Microsoft in New Mexico in April 1975.

It’s easy to imagine that Gates leaving Harvard to work his way up the ladder at an existing company could have altered the course of his career path — possibly delaying the creation of Microsoft, if it still would have happened at all. 

But, Gates tells CNB Make It that was never really a likely outcome: “We were just trying to get the ego boost of people offering us jobs, which was kind of fun,” he says.

Instead, the job offers he received that year gave Gates a confidence boost, cementing in his mind that his future was in computers.

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