Idea Man Page 4
I was lucky to come of age in a time of fundamental change in the computer industry. Computing power, once the sole province of government and the wealthiest corporations and universities, could now be parceled out at an hourly rate. New technology delivered that power to scattered offices or schools. As usual, timing was crucial. If I’d been born five years earlier, I might have lacked the patience as a teenager to put up with batch-processing computers. Had I come around five years later, after time-sharing became institutionalized, I would have missed the opportunities that come from trying something new.
RATHER THAN MAKE programming a formal part of the math curriculum, Lakeside offered it as an independent study option. We were lightly supervised by Fred Wright, a young math teacher who’d taken a summer course in punch card programming at Stanford. Mr. Wright gave us a BASIC manual and a few starter problems to whet our appetites, and then he let us loose. Because we didn’t know the “correct” way of doing things, we devised our own techniques. We became resourceful of necessity.
Only the most cursory documentation was furnished to help us. The BASIC manual was fifty-odd pages long, and I consumed it in a day or two. I memorized the twenty or so main keywords and how certain keys functioned on the Teletype. The language felt foreign for the first hour or two, and then it was—Oh yeah, I get it. BASIC was a lot easier than French: consistently logical, no irregular verbs, compact vocabulary. When I got stumped, I’d ask one of the seniors for help: How do you make that work? How do you print that? They were a month or so ahead of me and happy to show off what they knew.
In one of my first programs, borrowed from a manual, I graphed a sine wave. I watched the teleprinter’s carriage swing back and forth to print a perfect pattern of asterisks, as though moved by an unseen, mesmerizing hand. Within days Fred Wright had little left to teach us. Now and then he’d pop his head in, smile, and say, “How are you guys doing?” Some of the stodgier teachers grumbled that we had too much freedom, but Mr. Wright loved riding that fine line between control and chaos, unleashing our enthusiasm.
It’s hard to convey my excitement when I sat down at the Teletype. With my program written out on notebook paper, I’d type it in on the keyboard with the paper tape punch turned on. Then I’d dial into the GE computer, wait for a beep, log on with the school’s password, and hit the start button to feed the paper tape through the reader, which took several minutes.
At last came the big moment. I’d type “RUN,” and soon my results printed out at ten characters per second—a glacial pace next to today’s laser printers, but exhilarating at the time. It would soon be apparent whether my program worked; if not, I’d get an error message. In either case, I’d quickly log off to save money. Then I’d fix any mistakes by advancing the paper tape to the error and correcting it on the keyboard while simultaneously punching a new tape—a delicate maneuver nowadays handled by a simple click of a mouse and a keystroke. When I achieved a working program, I’d secure it with a rubber band and stow it on a shelf until the next session.
For young people today, this process might seem hopelessly laborious, like cracking a walnut with a Rube Goldberg machine. But for high school students in the late 1960s, it was astounding to get “instant” feedback from a computer, even if you had to wait several seconds for the machine’s next move in a game of Yahtzee. In a sense, that time-sharing terminal marked my start in personal computing years before personal computers. Programming resonated with my drive to figure out whether things worked or not and then to fix them. I’d long marveled at the innards of things, from transistors and integrated circuits back to that young-reader’s book on road equipment. But crafting my own computer code felt more creative than anything I’d tried before. I sensed that there would always be more to learn, layer upon layer of knowledge and techniques.
Soon I was spending every lunchtime and free period around the Teletype with my fellow aficionados. Others might have found us eccentric, but I didn’t care. I had discovered my calling. I was a programmer.
TWENTY OR SO students dropped into the computer room from time to time, but only half a dozen made it the hub of their universe. Although programming at its heart is a solitary venture, we became a nascent brotherhood. With no teachers to guide us, we traded commands and tricks of the trade. While a few of the acolytes were older students like Robert McCaw and Harvey Motulsky, I was one of four younger ones who formed the core. Ric Weiland, the son of a Boeing engineer, resembled Spock in Star Trek without the pointy ears: quiet, kind, meticulous. Ric built his own tic-tac-toe relay computer in the ninth grade, but never sought attention; he was happier in the background. Kent Evans, a minister’s son two years younger than Ric and I, had frizzy hair, an intricate set of braces, and unflagging intensity. He was game for anything.
One day early that fall, I saw a gangly, freckle-faced eighth-grader edging his way into the crowd around the Teletype, all arms and legs and nervous energy. He had a scruffy-preppy look: pullover sweater, tan slacks, enormous saddle shoes. His blond hair went all over the place. You could tell three things about Bill Gates pretty quickly. He was really smart. He was really competitive; he wanted to show you how smart he was. And he was really, really persistent. After that first time, he kept coming back. Many times he and I would be the only ones there.
Bill came from a family that was prominent even by Lakeside standards; his father later served as president of the state bar association. I remember the first time I went to Bill’s big house a block or so above Lake Washington, feeling a little awed. His parents subscribed to Fortune and Bill read it religiously. One day he showed me the magazine’s special annual issue and asked me, “What do you think it’s like to run a Fortune 500 company?” I said I had no idea. And Bill said, “Maybe we’ll have our own company someday.” He was thirteen years old and already a budding entrepreneur.
Where I was curious to study everything in sight, Bill would focus on one task at a time with total discipline. You could see it when he programmed—he’d sit with a marker clenched in his mouth, tapping his feet and rocking, impervious to distraction. He had a unique way of typing, sort of a six-finger, sideways scrabble. There’s a famous photograph of Bill and me in the computer room not long after we first met. I’m seated in a hardback chair at the teleprinter in my dapper green corduroy jacket and turtleneck. Bill is standing to my side in a plaid shirt, his head cocked attentively, eyes trained on the printer as I typed. He looks even younger than he actually was. I look like an older brother, which was something Bill didn’t have.
LIKE ALL TEENAGE boys, we loved games. Harvey Motulsky created a text-based version of Monopoly, with the computer’s random number generator “rolling the dice.” Bob McCaw put together a virtual casino program (including craps, blackjack, and roulette) that involved three hundred lines of code. We proudly mounted the printout up one wall, across the ceiling, and down the other.
Within a month, we’d run through the Mothers Club’s budget for computer time for the year, so they allocated a little bit more. In early November, as computer blackjack began to pall, I got news from Harvey. A time-sharing company had opened in Seattle’s University District. It needed people for acceptance testing of its new-model leased computer, a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10.
The next night I asked my father to take me to the Computer Center Corporation, a ten-minute drive from our home. I peered through the plate glass, into a room that never went dark, at the mysterious puppy in the window: a black mainframe with cabinet after cabinet and panels of blinking lights. The CPU alone was about five feet wide. It was the first time that I’d seen an actual computer in the flesh, and it seemed not quite real that such a thing could exist just forty blocks from where I lived. All I wanted to do at that moment was log on, connect, and have at it.
Today’s average laptop is thirty thousand times faster than the machine I was lusting after, with ten thousand times more memory. But in its day, the PDP-10 was the most advanced species of an evolutiona
ry alternative to the batch-processing establishment. Founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson, DEC made its first splash in 1960 with the PDP-1, the first truly interactive, “conversational” computer. Less than a decade later, the PDP-10 became the mainstay for the Defense Department’s ARPANET (the original Internet) and a time-sharing workhorse. It ran faster than GE’s system at Lakeside and had a broader software repertoire, including FORTRAN and other languages, plus a rich array of online utilities.
Fortunately for me and my fellow Lakesiders, this wonderful hardware all relied on a new operating system, TOPS-10, that was apt to crash whenever it served too many users at a time. Computer Center Corporation (which we’d call C-Cubed) had taken delivery of its leased PDP-10 in October 1968, with a plan to start selling time in the New Year. In the meantime, their TOPS-10 needed to be debugged before the paying customers arrived. As an added incentive for C-Cubed, its lease payments would be deferred until the software functioned reliably. The company needed somebody to push the system to its limit, which was where we came in.
One C-Cubed partner was a Lakeside mother who’d heard about our little tech fraternity. A few days after my sneak preview, Fred Wright ushered us into the building to make introductions. A resident guru laid out the deal: We could have unlimited free time on their terminals, off-hours, as long as we abided by their ground rules. “You can try to crash the computer,” he said, “but if it crashes from something you do, you’ve got to tell us what you did. And you can’t do it again until we tell you to try.”
The following Saturday, we met in the C-Cubed terminal room, a space three times the size of our cubbyhole at Lakeside. We were delighted to find a bank of a half-dozen ASR-33s: no more waiting to get on. Through another door lay the sanctum sanctorum, the computer room. Manned seven days a week by three shifts of operators, it was big and square and fluorescent-bright, with a shiny raised floor to keep the fat power and data cables out of harm’s way. Whenever a bulky disk drive was installed, industrial-size suction cups were used to lift the floor and run new cables. Between the air conditioning and the hulking computer’s fans, the place was so noisy that some operators wore hearing protectors, like workers on a factory floor.
For us, shifting from the GE-635 to the PDP-10 was like trading in a Corolla for a Ferrari. Saturdays were not nearly enough. We’d bus down to C-Cubed after school, cutting gym class to get there earlier, our junior briefcases in hand. (I doted on mine, which was brown leather and popped open at the lightest touch of my thumbs.) We were on the road to becoming hackers, in the original, nonfelonious sense of the term: fanatical programmers who stretched themselves to the limit. As author Steven Levy has noted, hacker culture was a meritocracy. Your status didn’t hinge on your age or what your father did for a living. All that counted was ingenuity and your hunger to learn more about coding.
Every neophyte needs a master, and C-Cubed had three of them. They were world-class programmers all, with a nerdish élan and a tinge of the exotic. Unlike the business-side executives, they didn’t treat us like nuisances; I suspect they may have seen in us their younger selves. At times it felt as though I’d jumped from high school into a postgraduate seminar in advanced systems programming.
Steve “Slug” Russell, the company’s hardware chief, was short and round, with a wry sense of humor. Then thirty-one, he’d followed John McCarthy from Dartmouth to MIT. There Russell had created Spacewar, the first truly interactive computer game, on a PDP-1.
Bill Weiher, slim and bespectacled, never said much. Known for developing SOS (an acronym for Son of STOPGAP, one of the first great text editors), he looked like a scribe from the Middle Ages. I’d see him crunching away tirelessly at his terminal, building elaborate structures of intricate code.
Dick Gruen, an ex-DEC consultant who’d met Russell and Weiher at Stanford, was the most gregarious of the lot, a junk-food addict and Falstaffian jokester with a mop of curly hair. According to Gruen, the operating system had yet to be born that he could not crash, and he was clever enough that I believed him.
To them we were “the Lakeside kids” or “the testers.” On occasion they’d have us simultaneously run a bunch of copies of a chess program to place an extra-heavy load on the system. Our assignment played to a teenager’s impulse to wreck things just for fun, while channeling it into something positive. As I later told a Seattle journalist, “The most effective way to learn was going hands-on with what was the top machine of the time, learning about how it worked, what it took to ‘make it or break it.’ ”
Another approach was to stress-test a piece of software until it failed, when we’d scribble down what happened on a piece of paper and move on. The ultimate coup was to crash the whole operating system, which would be apparent when the teleprinter froze and buzzed as you tried to type. Later Russell and Gruen would determine the source of the snag, happy as clams, knowing that their lease payment to DEC had been once again forestalled. We were happy, too. As long as we kept finding bugs, we’d extend our Camelot of free time.
When one of our mentors came by, I was almost too intimidated to speak. We adopted their jargon; a kludge, for example, was a baling-wire-and-gum sort of coding fix. They put up with our pestering, and every now and then threw us a bone from something they’d been working on. We were in awe of how efficiently they coded, a critical skill in an era of limited computer memory.
Mostly we were free to bang away on our own small projects. Bill worked on a war game; Ric grappled with FORTRAN. I wrote code for a matchmaking program. In the evening, we usually had the teleprinter room to ourselves. When we needed to pick up our listings, we’d knock on the computer-room door, say hello to the night operator, collect our printout, and return to our Teletypes. We might steal a glance at the PDP-10, but that was as close as we got.
THE KEY TO commercial time-sharing was permanent, high-speed data storage, a way to gain easy access to your work. C-Cubed limped along for months with old-generation disk drives that limited most customers to a couple dozen files of modest length. So there was great anticipation when Russell took delivery of a box about eight feet long by four feet high: a new moving-head disk drive from Bryant Computer Products in Walled Lake, Michigan. One of the company’s field service representatives, a thick-accented Southerner, called it the Giant Bryant. The name stuck.
The drive was built to heroic dimensions. A massive electric motor at the center ran a thick shaft that supported a dozen oxide-coated steel disks, each more than three feet in diameter. They spun in unison while a set of hydraulic arms with magnetic heads, floating on thin cushions of air, moved across their surfaces to read the data. The drive could store around 100 million characters, an order of magnitude beyond anything else available. (Today’s laptop drives typically store six hundred times as much data in 0.002 percent of the volume.)
Unfortunately, the Giant Bryant was flaky to a fault. Every so often, with as little provocation as a nearby footstep, a head would touch a disk and strip off the oxide: the ominous head crash, with data irretrievably lost and the disk damaged beyond repair.
For archival storage, C-Cubed used a less imposing device called DECtape. It came in four-inch canisters—small enough to slip into a pocket, large enough to hold a million characters. One 260-foot roll had the capacity of 2,500 feet of paper tape, or slightly more than the eight-inch floppy disks to be introduced by IBM five years later. Even within the limits of its motorized, reel-to-reel drive, DECtape was faster than paper tape and much sturdier, with dual redundancy and two layers of Mylar protecting the oxide. In demonstrations, DEC salesmen would punch a quarter-inch hole in the tape and then show that its data was intact.
Best of all, DECtape featured a directory structure, just like the Giant Bryant or the floppy drives to come. Traditional magnetic tapes were like sequential streams where stored information couldn’t be safely updated; if you wrote something new in the middle of a tape, subsequent data would be lost. But DECtape was organized in discrete blocks of data,
and one block could be rewritten without affecting any other. Now we could store half a dozen or more programs on a single tape, find all of them by name, and edit them independently or write over them. Up until I bought my own home terminal, my DECtapes were the first piece of computing technology that really belonged to me. We all wanted more of them—they were status symbols. Those little canisters made my work feel less ephemeral, more substantive, as though it had real and lasting value.
CHAPTER 4
ACOLYTES
As winter wore on, Bill and I exhibited the most stamina among the Lakesiders at C-Cubed. Typically my father would drive by to drag me home for dinner. I’d beg to stay—and won some and lost some. My parents worried that I was falling behind in school. Some of my grades were slipping, and my teachers seemed ambivalent about my new passion. In computer programming, Mr. Maestretti wrote, “Paul has been doing outstanding work on the computer. He has become tremendously interested in its workings, and has reached a sophistication far beyond … the average student.” But in physics, where he gave me a midterm C+ (though I’d pull out an A in the spring), he bemoaned “the channeling of [my] efforts into work with the computer at the expense of other academic areas.”
My English teacher, Mr. Tyler, dismayed by my chronic diffidence to homework, turned philosophical: “Paul is an ‘enthusiast’ (in the old religious sense) and when in the grip of an enthusiasm is almost totally irresponsible in other areas. How can one help such a student to see the error of his ways? I don’t know. He could even be more right than we, who knows?” In fact, I was thriving in a professional environment, working hard at something I took joy in. What better experience could there be for a sixteen-year-old?