Off the Charts: The Hidden Lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies by Ann Hulbert

Author:Ann Hulbert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2018-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

The Programmers

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As the spring semester of 1972 ended, a lonely fifteen-year-old college sophomore named Jonathan Edwards began spending as many nights as he could on the couch in a basement room of the electrical engineering department at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. At just about the same time, an eccentric high school junior named Bill Gates was quietly leaving home by the basement door every evening he could. His destination was the darkened office of a local Seattle company. Farther south, in what had recently been christened Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, a pot-smoking and acid-dropping high school senior, was secretly scheming with his good friend to produce “Blue Boxes” that enabled free long-distance phone calls.

The real lure for all the boys was, of course, a bigger box: computers. As a Hewlett-Packard Explorers Club member, Jobs “fell in love,” he recalled later, with an early, clunky desktop. The Lakeside Mothers Club at Gates’s elite private school had bought time for students on the refrigerator-size Program Data Processor-10, only to watch anxiously as some of them became addicted. In that empty Seattle office at night, Gates and several friends were hunched over the teletype keyboard (with a chess board at hand to occupy them while programs were running). Jonathan Edwards, alone in his lair, was keeping his PDP-11 discovery to himself. That summer a Baltimore Sun article highlighting two “Hopkins Students Who Skipped High School” didn’t mention what Jonathan was hooked on. Julian C. Stanley, the Johns Hopkins professor of psychology who helped speed him onward, didn’t remark on it either.

The fact that parents and teachers had next to no clue about what the boys were up to was part of the thrill. It added to the allure of a pursuit that exerted a rule-bound fascination similar to the spell cast by chess—with one enormous difference. Computers had real-world clout. To revise Stefan Zweig’s verdict on the self-enclosed realm of chess, the domain that had mesmerized Bobby Fischer: here was mathematics that added up to something, art with an end product, architecture with substance. The computer revolution was at hand. On this frontier, there was no clearly rated hierarchy of experts, much less a tradition of revered champions. The first hulking machines of the Cold War era belonged to a faceless military-industrial complex. Now computers were getting smaller, and the people obsessed with them had suddenly gotten much younger. Amid the antiwar protests, generational tumult, and technological ferment of the 1970s, a new category of teenage prodigies was emerging. They came bearing an insubordinate message with more far-reaching implications than Bobby’s: they were nobody’s protégés.

Unlike their prodigy predecessors, the adolescent boys lucky enough to get their hands on computers weren’t mere precocious achievers of adult-level prowess. They were poised to be pioneers. They knew the powers they were honing would influence everybody, not simply impress their elders. They also dared to presume they would set the pace and the path. And lonely though programming work could be, they soon

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