The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (15 page)

For maybe eight weeks the idea of a living computer chip had Clark’s mind racing down its long, dark tunnel. Kovacs already had a deal with the Defense Department, which thought the chip might come in handy in biological wars. Clark thought about other applications. Actually, he thought back to his graduate work at the University of Utah, where he had become fascinated with the idea of recording the electrical impulses in the brain and creating a kind of library of thoughts and sensations. If you could graft a cell onto a chip you could graft a chip onto a cell. “I’m sure in some way the neurosystem will one day be integrated with the computer,” said Clark. “Wouldn’t it be great if you could neurally integrate, say, the number 500342?” Chips could be planted inside the human body. Clark went to his friend John Hennessey, the dean of electrical engineering at Stanford, and offered to pay for a new field of study, which he wanted to call biocomputing.

Then one day Greg Kovacs disappeared, and Clark never mentioned him again. In place of Kovacs came a steady stream of young people, toting their inventions and ideas. There was FM and AM radio on the Web. There was local news on the Web. There were the countless fruits of the Human Genome Project. It wasn’t uncommon to find Jim Clark talking to someone with a glass of wine in one hand and a petri dish in the other. They came to his house. They came to his office. But if they were smart they came to the boat. The boat was where all serious gestation occurred. The boat was where he kept his mind alive to the possibilities.

Hyperion
was not merely a technologist’s utopia or a budding new new thing. It was both of those things. It was also a place where Clark could remain apart from the environment he was continually reinventing. He could never become one of those ordinary people—a venture capitalist or a chief executive or a member of a museum board or anything else that required him to behave in the way important businessmen are meant to behave. Circumstance had made him an insider, but temperament kept him forever an outsider. He was like the man who threw the world’s biggest bash and failed to show up for it. This outsiderliness was what gave him his unusual view of the world. His talent for groping the future was generally viewed as a supernatural gift, but it was a matter as much of his limitations as of his strengths. He could see human society in ways that most businessmen could not, because he was not very much a part of it. And consciously or not, by retiring to his floating island, he preserved this precious limitation.

The next time he and some new technology entered the larger society, he would be on his boat. He did not walk into other people’s lives; he sailed into them.

A
nd so to the boat we went, at least until the time came for the new new thing. What links Clark maintained from there to the world outside ran through twenty-five computers manufactured by Silicon Graphics and an Internet browser created by Netscape. “There is nothing more satisfying to me,” he said, “than to create a complete self-contained world when a computer is controlling it.” It took a while before anyone saw the full implications of that statement, especially for the less technical people who lived in that self-contained world. The first inkling came just after the tumultuous trial in the North Sea.

By the end of December 1998 the damage caused to
Hyperion
during its trial in the North Sea had been repaired, and the crew and the computer programmers moved on board and prepared for the Atlantic crossing. Soon enough it became clear to them that if you lived on board you either programmed the computer or were programmed by it. Either you were Steve and Lance and Tim, or you were not.

Steve and Lance and Tim each had, at one time or another, worked for Silicon Graphics; they had quit whatever they were doing to be involved in whatever Jim Clark was up to. Clark called this new enterprise Seascape. By the time of the sea trials the Seascape programmers had spent more than two years cobbling together the code required to control a sailboat. Right from the start they had assumed that Clark wouldn’t bother to yoke his yacht to a computer unless there was money to be made from it. They had no real reason to think this except that Clark was incapable of creating new technology without finding a way to make money from it. Any one of them could easily have found jobs, and stock options, with Yahoo or Cisco or even Microsoft. Yet they preferred to toil in relative commercial obscurity, building a system that any intelligent, uninformed person—that is, anyone who did not know Clark—would view as a rich man’s folly. To them Clark’s commercial life was a magic act.

Oddly enough, by December 1998, and before the software even had been tested, the programmers’ instincts were looking less like blind faith and more like prescience. One of Clark’s business ideas had them excited: the boat’s software could be adapted to the home. The American Home of the Future, it went without saying, would be controlled and monitored by a computer. The computer would permit the owner to enter into a new, fantastic relationship with his dwelling. Indeed, one way of viewing
Hyperion
was as a test of the technology. Clark had served up his sailboat’s captain and six-person crew as guinea pigs: they would see how life would be in a computerized home. By the end of 1998 Steve Hague, whom Clark had designated Seascape’s programmer in chief, was trading e-mails with corporate executives and venture capitalists who might become involved, then passing on the results of his discussions, also via e-mail, to Lance and Tim. The general idea was to sell their software first to rich technophiles and then, gradually, infiltrate the minds of the middle-class owners of suburban tract houses. In one of his messages written about the time
Hyperion
left its dock, Steve informed his fellow programmers of a big-time CEO who might want to help create, as Steve put it, “a package which he can sell as part of a big custom installation to the Larry Ellisons of the world [i.e., rich technologists]. Ultimately I think this technology could be sold as more of a standard product, maybe via franchises. One interesting example was big vacation homes in Hawaii where the owners would like to log in to the house over the web and see if the pool’s warm and the cleaners are not fucking in the master bed.”

No doubt the Home of the Future was only one of several possible uses Clark would find for their work. That was Clark’s job—to imagine a future for their software.
How
he did this Lance and Tim and Steve could not have cared less. Like a lot of the smart engineers in Silicon Valley, they had given up trying to figure out how Clark’s mind worked.

And so they wrote the code to control Clark’s boat and waited to find out what Clark’s next trick might be. Mainly, they tried to ensure that the first Home of the Future did not wind up on the ocean floor. They set up their machines on a long grade school cafeteria table in
Hyperion
’s main salon. Everyone else working on the boat—and along with the eight full-time crew members there were still dozens of boatyard workers—swirled around them. In context the computer programmers appeared idle. They sat quietly, stared into their screens and sipped cappuccinos. And yet they were by far the most important people on board
Hyperion
.

Steve Hague was the project manager, which is to say that he was supposed to stitch the patches of computer code written by different people at a furious speed into a perfect, seamless quilt. Many of the biggest patches were written by Clark himself, of course. This put Steve in the delicate position of supervising his boss. He acquired, as a result, a superhuman ability to sit still and be hollered at. His life had prepared him for the job. Raised in a working-class family in Leeds, a dreary city in the north of England, he had emerged with one of those wry, self-effacing personalities that have existed in England at least since Shakespeare wrote his comic relief. Steve was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Bardolph and Pistol rolled into one. When he claimed that his childhood had been so dull that he didn’t recall anything of it except that “a cat died once,” he was so perfectly droll that you didn’t stop and think about what that meant.

Although Steve’s skill with computers had been his ticket out of Leeds to Silicon Valley, he regarded the machine as, at best, an unsteady ally: it was always laying traps for the programmer. He thought of the computer as a less than straightforward tool for controlling and manipulating the world around it, like a shovel with a loose blade. He had little patience for the mystical, spiritual approach of computer programming. That is to say, his patience often was tried by Lance.

Lance was Lance Welsh, who, in the days leading up to the ocean crossing, sat beside Steve at the long cafeteria table in the boat’s main living room. Together with Steve and Jim Clark, he wrote the parts of the computer program you could see and touch. Typically when Lance set out to write a piece of code, he started with a complicated solution and made it even more complicated. Sometimes it worked, at other times it didn’t, but in every case no one else could figure out how Lance did what he had done. Lance was to computer programming what Joyce was to literature, possibly profound but also baffling. The trouble was that clarity and simplicity were more important in computer language than in human language. A programmer brought in from the outside to fix a bug in the code needed to determine quickly how it worked. With Lance’s code this was impossible. When something went wrong in it, which it often did, there were only two things that could be done. Either Lance had to go in and fix it himself, or someone had to start from the beginning and rewrite the program.

Lance was, in a word, a romantic. The nostalgia the romantic feels for the past Lance felt for the code he had written. For instance, editing computer code, like editing written English, often requires the programmer to remove extraneous lines. Lance refused to do this. Instead, he instructed the computer to preserve his old lines of code. When he came upon a passage that needed deleting, he wrote,

The computer took this to mean: ignore the old lines of code, but preserve them. In this way a lot of useless code written by Lance was entombed in
Hyperion
’s computers. This attempt at preservation was only mildly irritating to Steve; it drove Clark wild. Whenever Clark ran across one of these tiny electronic mummies, he’d redden and squinch up like the mouth of Mount Etna before an eruption. Then he set about deleting everything Lance had done. Lance often became upset and complained to Steve that “Jim has no feeling for the code.”

It didn’t help Lance’s political situation that he was handsome—and not just a little handsome. He was Last of the Mohicans handsome, all long dark hair and smoky features. Those assigned to open up Lance’s code and find a bug often assumed that Lance, at that very tedious moment, was out somewhere being chased by packs of randy women. Lance had the aura of a man who spent a lot of time being chased by packs of randy women. “Lance has some strange effect on females,” Steve explained. “Since I started on this project I’ve had more of my female friends ask me whether he was married than asked me whether Jim was married.” Every man who worked with Lance suspected that there must be some connection between his excessively romantic attitude toward computer programming and his appeal to women. Lance might not be proof that a male computer programmer, to be desirable to women, had to completely overhaul his attitude toward his machine. But he was terrifyingly suggestive evidence.

Tim Powell was the third man on the
Hyperion
job. He was built like a football tackle and thought of himself as the programming equivalent of one. If you asked him which part of the software he was responsible for, Tim would look away and blush. If you pressed the point, he would say, “If I do my job well, you’ll never know about it.” Possibly he had seen enough of the ongoing struggle between Jim and Steve and Lance to know he wanted no part of it. In any event, Tim lay low and worked hard and said little. Tim was the only reason I had to suspect that
Hyperion
would not wind up on the bottom of the ocean floor.

Steve and Lance and Tim and Jim; Jim and Tim and Lance and Steve. They had spent two years bouncing back and forth between Wolter Huisman’s boatyard and the single, stultifying room on top of a Jenny Craig weight loss center. Now on a dock outside of Amsterdam, they sat center stage. With every stroke of their keyboards they hacked a path through the forest that others would be required to follow. The computer programmer creates the only path available to the computer user; the effect of his decisions on others is masked by their abstraction. When you use Microsoft Word, for example, you enter a tiny mental space created by thousands of Microsoft programmers. In the case of software that controls the physical world, rather than merely a symbolic world, this path is less trivial. The programmers decided the steps everyone on board
Hyperion
would need to take to do everything from dimming the lights to raising the sails. In a thousand subtle and unsubtle ways they were reinventing the experience of living on board a boat.

This late afternoon in December 1998 was one of the last the three young programmers had before
Hyperion
left its dock and headed out across the Atlantic. None of the young men spoke. Presumably each was absorbed in his own little chain of logic, though you could never be sure. Then all hell broke loose.

It began with a problem, posed by Lance’s computer. Somewhere on the boat an alarm went off, and the words “Error Message” appeared on Lance’s screen. Lance shook his dark mane, sipped his cappuccino, and pretended not to notice. The boat was equipped with more than three thousand alarms. All were capable, in theory, of shouting insults at the captain, but normally they just made an annoying, high-pitched beep-beep-beep sound. At this stage of the work alarms rang constantly; you could hardly grab a beer from the fridge without triggering a red alert. Lance pointed to the message on his screen and said, “The computer has no sense of proportion. It doesn’t know whether what happened is serious or trivial. You get used to ignoring these alarm messages.”

“Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!”

This time the alarm came from a human being. Screams. They came from the galley.

“Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!
…” It was a high-pitched protest. And it was followed immediately by the sound of dishes crashing onto the floor.

The computer programmers swiveled in their chairs. Before them unfolded a puzzling scene. A thick slice out of the middle of the table that separated the galley from the lower salon rose up into the air, as if by magic. A partition had been built into the table between the galley and the rest of the boat; like everything else on the boat, it was automated. Tina,
Hyperion
’s chef, was throwing her slight frame across the rising slice of wood, in a futile bid to hold it in place. The dishes stacked on the table flew in eight directions. The whole thing was as inevitable as an execution. Steve and Lance and Tim watched as the partition rose and the dishes crashed and the cook in the galley slowly vanished. As she disappeared behind the partition, Tina’s screams become muffled, then silent.

“What the hell caused that?” asked Steve.

“I didn’t do anything,” said Tim.

“Who hit what?” asked Steve.

“I was working on the DVD player just before it happened,” says Lance. “Maybe that did it.”

The three young men in T-shirts and blue jeans shared a chuckle. The DVD player was
Hyperion
’s movie system. Like everything else on board, it was controlled through the computers. In suggesting that the computer code for the movies caused Tina’s table to rise up into the ceiling and send dishes flying, Lance had made a joke. Computer humor.

They quickly forgot the incident. They became lost once again in their sea blue screens. Now, as they typed, they also spoke. “The great thing about this project,” said Tim, “is that it’s software that talks to physical things rather than software that just talks to other software. You can
see
the effect of what you are doing.” Lance disagreed. He thought Tim’s need to
see
his work manifested in the physical world outside the computer betrayed a weakness of spirit. “Real nerds,” Lance said, “get just as excited when they’re talking to other software.”

“Jim doesn’t,” said Steve.

“Jim is juiced about other things,” said Lance. “He can now be master of his own domain by virtue of his expertise in computers. He can kick back and enjoy his Burgundy while the computer controls the wind and the sails.”