Idea Man Read online

  As my father raised the basement windows to clear out the gas, he said, “You’ve got to be more careful with your experiments, Paul.”

  But I also heard what he didn’t say: He never told me to stop. In the Allen household, children were treated like grown-ups. Our parents encouraged us at whatever we tried, and exposed us to Bach and jazz and flamenco, but it was more than that. They respected us as individuals who needed to find our own place in the world.

  SOON I WAS buying books on how to build small circuits: amplifiers, radio receivers, blinkers. I’d cart around a shoebox with batteries and lights and switches, the bits and pieces of my half-completed projects. In fifth grade, I read every science book I could find, along with bound issues of Popular Mechanics that were hauled home from the university library, to be devoured ten or twelve at a gulp. The magazines commonly had futuristic cars or robots on the cover. The whole culture back then was charged with schemes and speculation about technology, some of which wound up coming true.

  By sixth grade, I’d taken up electronics, which became even more fun when I found my first real partner. Doug Fullmer was a classmate who wore heavy horn-rimmed glasses and lived a block and a half up the hill. We were the kind of boys who could talk for hours about physics or astronomy. Living at the cusp between the analog world around us and the digital age about to engulf it, we couldn’t learn enough about either one.

  Later an electrical engineer at Raytheon, Doug shared my excitement when my dad bought me a Van de Graaff generator kit. It had a belt-driven motor that built up static electricity on an aluminum ball, enough for a two-inch spark. Or you could put your hand over it to make your hair stand on end. I suffered through my share of trial and error; once I nearly electrocuted myself when I grabbed both leads of a transformer at the same time. My muscles clamped up for ten interminable seconds before I could let go, my first near-death experience. But I liked electronics because its applications were open-ended, and you didn’t need an instruction book to create something new. Soon my jars of chemicals were collecting dust.

  I was the top boy in my class, but I couldn’t keep up with Stephanie Hazle because I got B’s in phys ed and spelling, and she got straight A’s. I was third-chair violin and Stephanie was first chair, and she was smug about it. She was smart and superconfident, but I just thought she was mean.

  One day I came to school with a jerry-rigged step-up transformer. The whole class lined up to hold the bare wire contacts, and kids giggled when they felt the tingle of electricity. But when Stephanie’s turn came, I moved a wire that raised the voltage from one battery to five. I knew it was harmless, because the current would last only a split second. But it was strong enough to make Stephanie scream and get reprimanded by the teacher. All the other kids had liked it, after all. Why was she making such a fuss?

  Almost instantly, my guilt overwhelmed my sense of satisfaction and lasted a lot longer. I still cringe when I think about it.

  THE FORCE OF nature always intrigued me. I was spellbound when my mother told us about the time she and my father outran a cluster of tornados at the University of Oklahoma, where my father got his undergraduate degree after the war. My mother wanted him to park beside a ditch under a big tree, but my father gunned the car and kept driving until he got to Anadarko. Later they went back to the university, and that big tree was just gone.

  One day in sixth grade, I was sitting in a temporary classroom for orchestra practice when I noticed something odd. The nested rings of light fixtures, hung by cables from the ceiling, were swaying like pendulums. Our teacher stayed focused on the score until she finally looked up and shouted, “Everybody out of the portable!” I ran onto the playground, my violin still in my hands, and found the asphalt rippling like waves in the ocean. That’s really strange, I thought. Later I heard that the earthquake measured over 6.5 on the Richter scale. Rumor had it that the top of the Space Needle swung more than fifteen feet side to side, far enough for water to slosh out of the restaurant’s toilets.

  I have a copy of the Sears Christmas catalog from 1960, when I was about to turn eight. It’s filled with items to quicken a boy’s pulse: a set of bongo drums; a student microscope to “reveal the invisible world”; a seven-unit Lionel electric train, complete with “guided missile” for blowing up the boxcar. For $17.98, you could purchase a kit for the Brainiac K-30, a “mechanical brain” that “computes, reasons, does arithmetical and logical problems … solves puzzles … plays games … works out codes—and more.”

  I knew from science fiction about big machines called computers that did wondrous things. But it was all vague until I turned eleven, when my mother took me for an after-the-dentist treat, a trip to the university bookstore. Passing the adventure section, where I’d already polished off the likes of Tom Swift and His Flying Lab, I chose a beginner’s volume about computers. In the simplest terms, it explained the fundamental bi-stable circuit, with an illustration of a flip-flop toggling between two transistors. In analog technology, boosting the input amplified output, much like increasing the flow of water from a faucet. But as a true digital device, the flip-flop circuit’s state was either one or zero, on or off. That book stripped the haze from computers and began to teach me how they really worked.

  Years later, I went with Doug to a science workshop at the Seattle Center, the former site of the world’s fair, and helped him build a light-activated robot on wheels that we called the Electronic Paramecium. Long before Star Wars, it resembled a scaled-down R2-D2. Although the robot never quite came together, the idea that we might do something so sophisticated was almost more exciting than the work itself. It was one more exercise that expanded my sense of the possible.

  BACK AT ST. VINCENT DE PAUL, Doug and I trolled for perfectly good televisions with blown vacuum tubes. We’d extract the tubes one by one and plug in spares that we’d bought for a dollar. When a set was beyond repair, I used a soldering iron to cannibalize the parts. (The work could be hazardous. One time I heard a sizzling sound, looked down, and found a glob of solder drilling a hole into my knee.) We also got some toaster-size tube radio sets up and running, and I’d tune into local stations for rock ’n’ roll or R & B. Those late-forties radios became my gateway into popular music.

  For Christmas in 1964, my parents gave me a three-transistor Sony, my first solid-state device—impossibly small, no larger than a pack of cigarettes. I was the kind of kid who liked to take things apart to see how they worked. When I removed the radio’s back panel to install the battery, I stared at those tiny resistors and capacitors, and I thought, Wow, I need to learn about this. There was mystery inside there; I felt as though I’d embarked on a quest. If I could just get enough of the details, I was sure I could figure it out.

  Sometime after that, Doug introduced me to integrated circuits, where transistors were embedded in the chip. I’d read about the new semiconductor industry, and how Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments had demonstrated the first working integrated circuit in 1958. Even so, it was something to hold one in your hand, all that electronic capacity encased in one miniaturized container.

  While I didn’t realize it at the time, I’d begun to follow the path foretold by Moore’s law.

  CHAPTER 3

  LAKESIDE

  Lakeside was the most prestigious private school in Seattle, and I wanted nothing to do with it. My Ravenna friends were moving on to seventh grade at Eckstein Junior High, the nearby public school, and I’d assumed I’d be with them. Worse yet, Lakeside was all boys, a grim prospect for a twelve-year-old.

  But when my parents heard that I’d spent most of sixth grade reading on my own in the back of the room, they decided that I needed more of a challenge. They would have to sacrifice to pay the Lakeside tuition—$1,335, a lot for a middle-class family in those days. But they wanted me to have opportunities they’d missed out on in Oklahoma.

  “Why do I have to go to private school?” I kept asking.

  “Because you’ll learn more,” my mother repli
ed. “And there will be a lot of other smart kids there. It’ll be good for you.”

  Lakeside’s entrance test was famously difficult. I decided to fail on purpose, and that would be that. It was a foolproof plan until I sat down with the exam: multiple choice, with lots of object rotations and pattern matching, a variation on a standard IQ test. This is kind of interesting, I thought. Let’s see how hard these questions are. I decided to solve the first set, just to see if I could, and then compensate at the end with a bunch of wrong answers.

  The next thing I knew, time was called: “Pencils down!” It was one of those tests that no one finished completely, and I hadn’t gotten around to filling in those mistakes. But I was sure I wouldn’t be admitted, anyway, since the odds were so slim.

  I got in. And my parents were right. It was really good for me.

  MODELED AFTER A New England prep school, Lakeside was a collection of old brick buildings on thirty acres near the Jackson Park Golf Course in north Seattle. I was thrown into a forty-eight-member class of the city’s elite: the sons of bankers and businessmen, lawyers and UW professors. With scattered exceptions, they were preppy kids who knew each other from private grammar schools or the Seattle Tennis Club.

  Just about everybody was smart at Lakeside, and they had skills and study habits that I lacked. The teachers were dynamic and demanding, prone to answering questions with questions. (The anomaly was Mr. Dunn, my volatile French teacher, who responded to careless conjugations with volleys of chalk and erasers.) For a while, I was tentative about raising my hand. I’d listen to the discussion and think my own thoughts, and then I’d chime in if nobody else did.

  It took me most of seventh grade to get my bearings. Finally I clicked with Mr. Spock, my English teacher and the brother of Benjamin Spock, the world-famous pediatrician. “Paul has continued to be the most perceptive and thoughtful boy in my class,” he wrote in my spring report card. Gradually I got used to being challenged. I’d grow more intellectually in my six years at Lakeside than in any other phase of my life.

  IN EIGHTH GRADE, two events stood out. For a pregame football rally, I rigged up an oil heater transformer under a chair that held an effigy in the opposing team’s colors. When the moment was right, the transformer set off a bunch of firecrackers stuffed in the dummy’s arms. It looked like an electrocution, just as I’d planned.

  My second big moment came when I was chosen to deliver the graduation address for Lakeside’s lower school. It was my first speech, and I slaved over it. As I rose before classmates, faculty, parents, and honored guests, I felt a strange sensation in my legs. My knees were knocking, just like a cartoon.

  It was 1967, and artificial intelligence was the hot theme in science fiction. I’d read Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, with its First Law of Robotics (“A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm”), and Colossus, a 1966 British novel about a malevolent megacomputer that wound up ruling the world. Newspapers of the day were filled with headlines like “Computers Are Taking Over,” or “Automated Government Is Here.”

  I began by hailing “the age of the computer” and a future that “holds for us the bright prospect of even more remarkable things to come.” After acknowledging the specter of computers someday replacing human workers on assembly lines, I paid my respects to the machines’ “amazing capabilities” in mathematics and their uses in banking, medicine, and the military. I pointed out that U.S. moon probes were in fact computer-run robots. But I was equally interested in what computers couldn’t do: “They cannot have an original idea. They are unable to go beyond the limitations of their programming. …”

  Were we on the threshold of a thinking robot? I closed with a prediction: “In fifty years, a robot with a fairly large brain cell capacity will be within reach.” Today it appears that I was highly optimistic. With 2017 now around the corner, we’re still not close to matching the abilities of the incalculably complex human brain.

  When I recently reread that speech, it brought back the image of a boy who was fascinated by computers but had little practical knowledge beyond the flip-flop circuit. All I knew came secondhand from things I’d read. When I was growing up, few people outside major universities or big corporations had ever seen a real computer. It would have been hard to imagine that I’d ever lay my hands on one.

  * * *

  WHILE LAKESIDE SEEMED conservative on the surface, it was educationally progressive. We had few rules and lots of opportunities, and all my schoolmates seemed passionate about something. But the school was also cliquish. There were golfers and tennis players, who carried their rackets wherever they went, and in the winter most everyone went skiing. I’d never done any of these things, and my friends were the boys who didn’t fit into the established groups. Then, in the fall of my tenth-grade year, my passion found me.

  My honors geometry teacher was Bill Dougall, the head of Lakeside’s science and math departments. A navy pilot in World War II, Mr. Dougall had an advanced degree in aeronautical engineering and another in French literature from the Sorbonne. In our school’s best tradition, he believed that book study wasn’t enough without real-world experience. He also realized that we’d need to know something about computers when we got to college. A few high schools were beginning to train students on traditional mainframes, but Mr. Dougall wanted something more engaging for us. In 1968 he approached the Lakeside Mothers Club, which agreed to use the proceeds from its annual rummage sale to lease a teleprinter terminal for computer time-sharing, a brand-new business at the time.

  On my way to math class in McAllister Hall, I stopped by for a look. As I approached the small room, the faint clacking got louder. I opened the door and found three boys squeezed inside. There was a bookcase and a worktable with piles of manuals, scraps from notebooks, and rolled-up fragments of yellow paper tape. The students were clustered around an overgrown electric typewriter, mounted on an aluminum-footed pedestal base: a Teletype Model ASR-33 (for Automatic Send and Receive). It was linked to a GE-635, a General Electric mainframe computer in a distant, unknown office.

  One senior hunched over the machine and its khaki-colored keyboard, while another looked on and made an occasional cryptic comment. To the keyboard’s right was an embedded rotary dial, for the modem; to its left sat the punch, which spewed a continuous stream of inch-wide, eight-column paper tape. Each character was defined by the configuration of holes punched out among the eight channels. (An inch length of tape held ten characters; a small program might run two or three feet.) In front of the punch, a paper-tape reader translated your programs and sent them to the GE computer.

  The Teletype made a terrific racket, a mix of low humming, the Gatling gun of the paper-tape punch, and the ka-chacko-whack of the printer keys. The room’s walls and ceiling had to be lined with white corkboard for soundproofing. But though it was noisy and slow, a dumb remote terminal with no display screen or lowercase letters, the ASR-33 was also state-of-the-art. I was transfixed. I sensed that you could do things with this machine.

  That year would be a watershed in matters digital. In March 1968, Hewlett-Packard introduced the first programmable desktop calculator. In June, Robert Dennard won a patent for a one-transistor cell of dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, a new and cheaper method of temporary data storage. In July, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore cofounded Intel Corporation. In December, at the legendary “Mother of All Demos” in San Francisco, the Stanford Research Institute’s Douglas Engelbart showed off his original versions of a mouse, a word processor, e-mail, and hypertext. Of all the epochal changes in store over the next two decades, a remarkable number were seeded over those ten months: cheap and reliable memory; a graphical user interface; a “killer” application, and more. Had anyone connected the dots, they might have foreseen the transformation of computers and how they would soon be used.

  THE CLASSIC MAINFRAMES of my youth were the size of tractor-trailers and wildly expensive. Those early IBMs and UNIVAC
s had no more computing power than today’s pocket calculators, but they took up entire rooms and threw off tremendous heat, even after transistors replaced vacuum tubes. They were overseen by trained operators who kept them running around the clock while the customers stayed outside, looking in. To gain access to computing, programmers used a keypunch machine to convert handwritten code into a deck of punch cards, one card per line. They’d snap a rubber band around the deck and bring it to an operator to have the cards read in.

  Then the programmers returned to their offices to wait, because the work went on the operators’ schedule. Depending on their job’s priority, they’d pick up a printout hours or sometimes days later. If one card was bent or out of sequence, or a single comma in the wrong place, they’d get an error message and not much else. They’d have to deduce their mistake and start again.

  “Batch processing,” as this system was called, worked fine for large-scale information management tasks, like corporate payrolls. But it became so frustrating for programmers that they mounted a guerrilla movement for greater interactivity. In 1957, the visionary John McCarthy demonstrated a radical software prototype: a “Compatible Time-sharing System,” as McCarthy called it, “that permits each user of a computer to behave as though he were in sole control.” Instead of passively waiting for punch cards to be processed, users communicated with the computer through their terminal keyboards. You could “talk” to a mainframe, receive a prompt reply, then make your corrections. Programming became more like a conversation.

  Time-sharing made computer time affordable by spreading costs among hundreds of users. Dozens of people could engage one computer simultaneously, with the central processing unit shifting from one person’s work to the next in a fraction of a second. The new back-and-forth rhythm wasn’t merely more efficient. It was a leap that made card decks superfluous and computer users far more productive. In 1965, General Electric packaged a refined version of McCarthy’s system with the original Dartmouth BASIC and launched a commercial service. Three years after that, Bill Dougall and the Mothers Club brought it to Lakeside.