A Truck Full of Money (12 page)

They were nearly the same age. Both had their first encounter with computers in seventh grade, though Karl's early romance was more innocent and chaperoned. His family was living in Palo Alto for a year, one of the few places in the late 1970s where a junior high school student was apt to find a formal class in programming. Learning to code had felt immediately comfortable to Karl, as it had to Paul, like developing an inborn trait. You wrote the program just so, and in no time you saw the correct answer appear, an answer worked out not by you but by the machine under your command. This was powerful stuff, magical in the sense of Arthur C. Clarke's third law of prediction: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

After Palo Alto, Karl's family had returned to Canton, in upstate New York, the home of St. Lawrence University, where his mother taught music. On holidays and college vacations, Karl would use a plastic card to jimmy open the door to the university's computer lab, where he spent hours reading manuals and trying out what he learned. What he later called the social niceties didn't come easily to him, but that didn't matter with computers. Exploring them didn't require that he deal with other people and their complexities. Writing software seemed to occupy a place between pure mathematics and the experimental sciences, between the search for a platonic ideal and the search for theories that jibed with observations of nature. He referred to writing software as “this funny business.” It was the creation of something
“notional/fictional/imaginary”
that nonetheless had tangible effects. Coding was infinitely precise and yet imperfectible. Programs got written and revised until they did their jobs as well as possible. It was, Karl thought, a field for people who liked “the idea of good enough instead of perfect, the idea of play around in your head instead of play around in the mud.” If your program failed, it was because you hadn't tried hard enough, not because information was withheld or missing. Programming computers felt, Karl would say, like entering “a universe unto itself.”

He had been a model student in high school, especially compared to Paul, and went on to Dartmouth to study the almost brand-new field of computer science. One day in 1983, his professor handed him a tape that contained some new software, saying, “You're a bright guy, Karl. Go and install this stuff.” The tape contained Donald Knuth's typesetting system T
E
X and the handbook Knuth had written for it,
The T
E
Xbook
. It began: “GENTLE READER: This is a handbook about T
E
X, a new typesetting system intended for the creation of beautiful books—and especially for books that contain a lot of mathematics.”

Karl loved it, the clarity of Knuth's prose style and the central idea behind the T
E
X software: that via a computer one could create art. And you could use T
E
X free of charge and change it however you wanted, so long as you didn't call your modified version T
E
X. This wasn't very unusual then. As Karl would put it, “Universities were still about sharing knowledge (instead of cashing in on it).” Karl would also say that he had his best luck socially through the computer. He had met his first girlfriend on one of the early online news and discussion groups. She was a typographer and a T
E
X enthusiast.

In the 1960s, IBM created a complex operating system called DOS and all but gave it away—to Microsoft, then a small company. In the years since, software had become an increasingly valuable commodity, and companies were turning the programs their employees wrote into private estates, surrounded by walls of secrecy, restrictive copyright licenses, and eventually patents. Meanwhile, a movement of programmers had begun to grow up in opposition. It ultimately became what amounted to a large, informal commune of great significance, which advanced the state of the art, kept the Internet and World Wide Web free for all to use, and produced those great libraries of code that anyone could borrow from, including entrepreneurs.

The progenitor of this movement was a legendary programmer named Richard Stallman. He founded something called the Free Software Foundation. Karl came across it in its early days, and was drawn to it at once. “Share and share alike”: that was how Karl summed up the philosophy. He argued the case with Paul sometimes, down in the computer room.

“I won't invest a lot of R&D effort in my company if someone can just rip me off by copying all my ideas,” Paul wrote in one email to Karl, arguing for limited software patent protection. In another, he wrote: “I don't like the idea of throwing out the baby with the bath water, killing software patents all together.”

Karl replied that it would be far better to have no software patents at all than the thousands upon thousands of patents that claimed ownership of software that by rights, and even by statute, should have belonged to everyone. Many patents were so broad that they encompassed elements fundamental to programming, elements long in the public domain. And there were so many of those kinds of patents that programmers often had no way of knowing which ones they might be violating as they wrote their code.

The argument widened at times. Paul wrote, for instance: “Capitalism American-style says that a million people all acting selfishly and *without regard for others* somehow create something reasonable.”

“I disagree that that is the case,” replied Karl.

In Karl, Paul had met someone who stood for an ideal. Paul was an idealist, too, but also a pragmatist, and a lot less innocent than Karl. It would have been hard to imagine Karl dealing pot or shooting bottle rockets at tailgating cars. At one point Karl wrote, on the wisdom of abolishing software patents: “I hope I can convince you. If I can't convince you, I despair.”

Paul hung out with Karl and his girlfriend—she was a fellow master's student—on many evenings in the main computer science room at UMass. To Karl, it seemed as though a lot of the other students there were learning this trade just to land jobs with good pay. He and Paul didn't talk about that sort of thing. They traded thoughts on the craft of programming and on their other enthusiasms, which they were combining with programming. Paul just then was very interested in writing synthesizers, code that could turn a computer into a musical instrument. Karl and his girlfriend were fascinated with typesetting and the grand suite of software that Knuth had created for digital typography.

At the end of the master's program, students were divided into teams of four or five, each team to work cooperatively on creating a substantial program. Paul and Karl and his girlfriend asked that they be placed on the same team, but the professor demurred. They were his best students, and he wanted them spread around. The course was supposed to teach a process. The product didn't really matter. But it wasn't very long before Paul went to the professor and told him that his teammates didn't know what they were doing. Why didn't he let Paul do the project by himself? He could do it in half the time the team would take. “You don't understand what this course is about,” the professor answered. “
I
could do the project in half the time, but I'm not going to, and neither are you. What you
are
going to do is teach your team and get the project done on time.” Paul complied, happily enough.

Afterward, he and Karl both stayed on in Boston, but they went separate ways. Karl and his girlfriend got jobs at the Free Software Foundation, where they went to work on creating a digital family of fonts, a very challenging task in that era. Paul went to his professor Bob Morris and asked him again if he could have a job at Interleaf. This time Morris said, “Okay. You're ready now.”

Boston's social structure had accreted over four centuries. By tradition, certain routes to success were blocked for someone like Paul. In one world, people pronounced “wheelbarrow” as if the word were “wheelbarrel,” and like Paul got married in a Polish Catholic church in Dorchester. And in the other, girls learned excellent posture and grew up saying “toe-
mah
-toe,” not “tamayta,” and a lad went to country day school, then prep school, and then, if his grades were merely decent, Harvard, where he would be examined during “punching season” and invited to join a final club—the invitation guaranteed if it had been his father's club and he was a “legacy.” A family address in Louisburg Square, a brass plate on the door, a father who took you to Brooks Brothers or maybe his tailor to buy your first suit. Money lay behind the whole construction, of course, but when it came to membership, manners mattered more than money. If you didn't have a trust fund awaiting you at twenty-one, and even if your parents had fallen to shabby gentility, you could still land a job at an institution like the State Street Bank and Trust, and work among mahogany and the models of the sorts of sailing ships that had founded the old fortunes still being managed there. You'd be hired in the certainty that your boss could take you out to lunch at the Somerset Club and wouldn't have to ask the steward to outfit you with a proper jacket and tie. You would carry in your accent the assurance that you knew the difference between the fish fork and the salad fork, and of course you would never have to murmur “BMW.”

One could feel excluded from that world even after being admitted to one of its favored institutions. In his autobiography, Tom White wrote about going to college in the 1930s: “I did not like attending Harvard—especially the first two years when I was a commuter. I had a poor self-image to start with and felt inferior to some of the good-looking, self-assured wealthy young guys. There was a separate house for commuters on a side street off Harvard Square. Commuters used it to study, have a meal or a snack, or just rest for a while. I even hated going in there. I just hated the fact that I was a townie I guess.” In later life, Tom made the acquaintance of a scion of one of Boston's founding elite, Alexander Forbes. “Sandy was class of 1932 at Harvard, handsome guy, a real Brahmin, just like the Cabots and the Lowells, spoke only to God,” Tom wrote. The last time Tom ran into Forbes, the man was pushing ninety. He said to Tom, “Things change as you go through life, and we don't feel about you people the way we used to.”
You people.
By then, Tom wrote, he felt only amusement.

One can overstate the exclusionary power exercised by Boston's Anglo-Saxon elite. There had long been ways for a young Irish Catholic to rise. Tom had found one, in construction. “In my business,” he liked to say, “all you had to be was low bidder.” There was politics, of course. And thanks to recent economic history, there was another and broadening route up, the technological exception. You could have the wrong accent and no table manners, and be possessed by psychological oddities or worse, so long as you belonged among Knuth's 2 percent, born to program computers.

Enthusiasts imagined that digital technologies would serve as a great democratizing, equalizing force. At worst this was sheer fantasy, and at best just one of many distant possibilities in the kaleidoscope of the future. But there was one social revolution that computers certainly performed. Out on the highways that half encircled Boston—Route 128 and I-495—great clutters of new computer-related companies were arising. Most of the buildings had all the grace and style of grids on graph paper—quickly built, inexpensive, functional. The founder might be an immigrant's son with a knack for engineering, his office suite decked out in wallpaper that vaguely looked like wood paneling. Downstairs, in cubicles and windowless labs, engineers were producing stuff that was in turn producing immense new fortunes. For those in the business of making or selling it, computer technology really was a new way to rise. Merit counted more in the business of computer programming than in most professions. And for boys, at least, the road from software engineer to software entrepreneur, from wage earner to company founder, was already well marked out, there for the taking when Paul arrived at Interleaf in 1989.

For Paul, 1989 was a year of formal steps to adulthood. He was twenty-five. He got married and bought a house—he chose one about the size of his family's house on Perham Street—and he started what he thought of as his first real job. The man who hired Paul at Interleaf was a business executive named Larry Bohn. He wasn't a programmer himself, but he was, as Paul would later say, a shrewd observer of programmers. Bohn gave Paul a low-level task for starters, and Paul made a face as if to say, “Are you kidding me? I could do that in my sleep.” He did the job in no time and soon afterward was made a member of the product development group, or “prodvlp,” also known, to some of its members anyway, as “the elite group.” There were fewer than a dozen of them. Paul was the youngest.

The 1980s had been a time of ferment in the world that Paul was joining. Inventions in hardware and software routinely came out of places like Bell Labs, Xerox
PARC
, MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon. Then others crowded around the new things, improving, refining, extending the inventions.

Interleaf ranked among the growing throng of companies that were exploiting the power of computers to write, assemble, edit, and print documents. Its engineers had created one of the first commercial “
WYSIWYG
” user interfaces—a what-you-see-is-what-you-get system, one of the marvels of the time: As you typed, you saw right on your computer screen what the printed page would look like; when you made revisions, they rippled automatically throughout your document.

The company specialized in serving large organizations, selling them the software to create complex, gigantic documents, such as manuals for airplanes. Interleaf had just survived a difficult restructuring of its business. It had about five hundred employees, offices in Europe and Japan, and clients such as Boeing, Caterpillar Tractor, and the U.S. Army.

At one point, a member of the elite team wrote a program to measure the productivity of his colleagues. Paul took on the challenge with relish, and won. He imagined this as friendly competition among peers. But he sometimes uttered angry words about coders he didn't respect. Didn't this person know how to write code? Why didn't Interleaf just eliminate mediocre coders? More than one programmer complained about Paul to Larry Bohn, saying, in effect: “He trashed my code and rewrote it, just to show how good he is.” Paul's outbursts didn't seem premeditated to Larry. From time to time, Larry remonstrated with him, and Paul would seem surprised and apologetic. It seemed to Larry that the young man was under the influence of forces he couldn't understand, let alone control.

When Paul arrived, Interleaf was embarking on a large revision of its product. Paul did some of the essential work. He did his coding in a cubicle, sitting for hours and hours in front of a screen, but his mind was a kinetic place, where he was “hauling” code that others had written into his text editor, “grokking it” (scanning and understanding it), and “ripping it apart.” Years later, repossessing the young man who did this work, Paul said: “Before I ripped code apart, I first played with it a bit, maybe like some animals play with their prey before eating it.”

The existing corpus of Interleaf software consisted of hundreds of thousands of lines of code divided into about two dozen subsystems, such as “pagination” and “tables.” Often Paul would make a change in one subsystem and realize he had to make changes in another and then another and another. Sometimes he'd find himself “pushing through” ten subsystems at once, holding the meaning of thousands of lines of code in his mind. It was compelling work. It felt glorious to be at moments the master of a thing so complex. And it was hard to stop. Time went away in stages. “At first, you start to lose track of what time it is. Is it eight
P.M.
already? You only realize that because you suddenly realize you are incredibly hungry, because you coded right through a mealtime. Then you start losing track of what day of the week it is. In the rare cases where I had to put a date on paper, I sometimes had to think about what month it was. There were many nights when I was coding, so totally enthralled with it that I lost all track of time. I would look at a clock and see four o'clock but have to think for a second as to whether it was 4
P.M.
or 4
A.M.
”

His hundred-hour weeks weren't over when they were over. When he came home to his young wife, it was usually with his thoughts still framed in the hieroglyphics of the programming languages Lisp and C, his mind still racing around the Interleaf subsystems. He couldn't stop talking about his work. He told himself,
I'm just in a prolific period.
And then there were times when he took a weekend off and found himself seized with lethargy and unnameable fear, and his bedroom felt like the nearest thing to a safe place. Once in a while, he holed up there for an entire day, as he sometimes had in the converted garage on Perham Street. That had probably been a typical phase of a teenager's life. If so, what was this?

There were days and parts of days when he had to struggle for civility. This happened most often when he had to go to meetings. There would be five people in the room and he would try to explain what he was doing with his code, and no one would understand. He'd think,
What, are they stupid? How much do I have to spell this out? They can't go from A to C?
Some of those times he felt as if he were back in elementary school, teachers asking would he please explain how he had come up with the answer to a math problem so quickly, and, feeling both irritated and puzzled, he would reply, “It's obvious.” Sometimes in the meeting rooms at Interleaf, it seemed as if the uncomprehending others were ganging up on him, and what he felt then was anger. Sometimes he let it show. “Do I have to explain
every fucking step
here?”

After about six months of wild coding, Paul forced himself toward clarity. Something was happening to him that he didn't understand. It was a weekend. He asked his wife to take him to Newton-Wellesley, the nearest big hospital. He didn't dare to drive himself.

The neurology resident told Paul that he had bipolar disorder. Paul didn't want to believe it, but when he returned for a second opinion, the chief of neurology confirmed the diagnosis and prescribed lithium. The drug left a bad taste in Paul's mouth, as if he'd been sucking on pennies, and taking the drug meant acknowledging that he had this thing, this
disorder,
inside him. He told no one at work.

He stayed on lithium for several months, just long enough, almost, to forget how he had felt before. A friend came by his cubicle and asked, “What's wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” Paul replied.

“You've lost all your energy,” his friend said. “You sure you're not depressed?”

“Actually, I feel pretty flat,” said Paul. “Like, I feel safe.”

But afterward, he thought,
I don't want to lose my energy.
He could deal with anything but that. He quit lithium at once.