What would Bill Gates take to a desert island?

Microsoft's co-founder, Bill Gates, has appeared on the long-running BBC Radio 4 show Desert Island Discs.

Among other things, Gates speaks about writing computer programmes at the age of 13, the early days of Microsoft, his relationship with the late Apple founder Steve Jobs, and his current role as co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest independent charitable organisation in the world.

Guests on the show are asked to choose eight pieces of music, one book and a luxury item to take with them to a desert island. Gates' musical choices include tracks by Jimi Hendrix, U2, The Beatles and David Bowie.

Here are a few key quotes from the interview, which you can listen to in full here:

On eradicating disease

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has to date spent $34 billion on projects in 100 countries.

On the ones that matter most to him, Gates says: "The big thing for us is getting rid of the diseases that kill children under five. Over the last 25 years, we've gone from having 12 million children a year die, to now less than 6 million a year, and we'd like to cut that in half again in the next 15 years. That means we have to go take malaria, which is still killing over 600,000 children a year, and we have to get rid of it."

On the importance of giving back, Gates said: "The wealth I had from Microsoft... Melinda and I wanted to give it back in the most impactful way, and so after a trip to Africa, we really started learning about disease... We were stunned to learn that for each $1000 we gave, if we did it the right way, we could save a life."

On choosing a career

An incredibly gifted student, Gates read as much as he could to try and find a career path that matched his abilities.

"There were a lot of mysteries about how things worked," he says. "Why some people succeeded and other people didn't. I read tonnes of biographies of people to get a sense of different careers.

"I knew I wanted to work on hard problems, so being a lawyer looked interesting, but being a scientist looked even more interesting. And then the computer came along and surprised me... It was completely new. So it answered my question of what I was going to work on."

Gates recalls the first time he saw a computer when he was 14.z

"The teachers found it very baffling. There were a few of us who were very good at math, so we sat around playing with the thing, we ended up figuring it out. They even had us teach programming to some of the other kids as well. Then companies eventually came and said 'hey, come and help us with software problems.'"

On creating Microsoft

"Paul [Allen, co-founder of Microsoft] had seen that the microprocessor was coming," Gates says. Then, in 1974, the pair realised that not only was the future they had envisaged already happening, there was a danger it was going to happen without them.

So Gates dropped out of Harvard aged 19 to start Microsoft with Allen.

"If the company had failed, it's not like Harvard wouldn't have taken me back.

"Paul and I had done enough programming things - including our high-school scheduling - that we saved some money. So we just funded [the company] ourselves and had enough to hire a few people.

"Being first helped a lot. We got to make a lot of mistakes, because it was all new. How do you go do business in Japan? I'm hiring people who are older then me, I can't even rent a car because I'm not 21 years old, so it was really frenetic."

In the early days at the helm of Microsoft, Gates admits that his work was "the centre of my life."

"I was quite fanatical about work," he says. "I worked weekends, I didn't really believe in vacations."

"I had to be a little careful not to try and apply my standards to how hard [others at the company] worked. I knew everybody's licence plate so I could look out the parking lot and see, you know, when people come in. Eventually I had to loosen up as the company got to a reasonable size."

On Steve Jobs

Gates dedicates one of his song choices, Two of Us by The Beatles, to the Apple founder Steve Jobs, who he describes as an "incredible genius."

"Steve really is a singular person in the history of personal computing in terms of what he built at Apple. For some periods, we were completely allies working together - I wrote software for the original Apple II. Sometimes he would be very tough on you, sometimes he'd be very encouraging. He got really great work out of people.

"In the early years, the intensity had always been about the project, and so then Steve got sick, it was far more mellow in terms of talking about our lives and our kids. Steve was an incredible genius, and I was more of an engineer than he was. But anyway, it was fun. It was more of a friendship that was reflective."