Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 13 The Dropout

Jay and Vladik saw each other on vacations long and short. Sometimes they grew apart, but always they found their way back. Vladik’s family could never have afforded the travel, in either its scope or style, that Jay and his family undertook. Yet, every year, at least once a year, thanks to Orrix generosity, he was off with them to some exotic place, most often exploring nature under the tutelage of Jenk, who seemed to know every plant and animal by name; Latin name, common name, and often first name. Jenk particularly liked the southern oceans, with their atolls, reefs, and abundant brown-skinned natives willing to fawn all over the guests, and for the opportunities for getting into clear, often deep water. Vladik loved being in the water. Jay preferred to be on top of it. He hated, too, being tied down to anyone’s schedule, even his own family’s. Often, it was only the release valve of Vladik’s listening that calmed Jay down enough to keep the Orrix family party from disintegrating.

While Jay was more interested in physical materials and their exothermic combinations, Vladik drifted toward code. He was LISPing at eight, and he had learned to program all the early home computers: TRS-80, Commodore 64, Apple II. As a sop to his father’s interest in games and puzzles, he wrote programs for board games. To improve performance, he dove into the machine’s own language, exploitations of which made him pretty famous in the small group of people who cared about machine backgammon. The drive for performance led next to an obsession with the microprocessors at the heart of it, and there he ran up against the fact that the best computers you could buy deployed chips that were already two years old. There was nothing to be done about that except to rage against the manufacturers.

Vladik switched gears and became absorbed in the nuances of compression and cryptography, and in the summer of his fifteenth year, he got a paid job optimizing code for one of his mother’s colleagues at Bell Labs. “Ah, monopoly profits,” Vladik used to say, before he began a riff on all the ways monopoly worked for and against us. Later that same year, Intel came out with its breakthrough 80386 32-bit processor. There were no sockets for it to call home. “What I could have done in backgammon tournaments if only I had a computer with that engine!” he told me.

Jay and Vladik reached the age of majority. The two had made explosives in the family’s basement lab, had lived to tell of it, and had retained all their fingers and toes and both eyes and ears, too. They had grown plants of religious significance and isolated from them interesting molecules which became the starting materials for the synthesis of controlled substances which they then assayed—grading themselves favorably on the results. They both had held jobs of some significance in Orrix Enterprises, although neither of them showed any continuing interest in Jenk’s agriculture products.

That spring, Vladik wrote a letter to Intel’s founders, Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore, explaining what a great showcase his software would make for their so-called i386, and he provided detail on exactly how to prototype such a machine, suggesting that Intel should hire him in the following summer and provide him with the chips, a prototyping system, and electronic testing hardware to pull it off. He wrote, with boyish glee, “even if the first users of this hardware are only nutty hobbyists whose aim is to compute all the names of God, more serious parties will soon recognize that, with a little logic gluing them together, these inexpensive and innocent-looking boards are the components of a parallel supercomputer that will be able to compete with the multi-million dollar machines from the likes of Cray. Beware the killer micros!”

At the end of the letter, he also mused on the fact that without a competitor for this generation of chips, Intel’s monopoly would allow it to “rule the world for the next fifteen years.” Noyce believed that, sure enough, but what struck him most was that the kid’s ideas about compiler optimization were as advanced as the company’s. Intel hired him as a summer intern to work on exactly that. There was no protocol for employing a boy twenty-six hundred miles from home, so while they put him up in the same Santa Clara residences where Intel housed the college-age summer interns, Human Relations recruited a dream team of older and more experienced employees who would introduce him around the company and show him much more than the other interns would ever see. They were also to invite him to dinner, take him to baseball games in San Francisco and Oakland, guide him on tours of Bay Area, and make sure he was occupied, well-fed, and drug-free.

“I flew in to Silicon Valley’s airport, San Jose International, SJC, around noon on a Friday. My program didn’t start until the following afternoon, so my host drove me directly to a condo complex called the Oakwood and there showed me my furnished one-bedroom home for the summer. ‘Get some sleep. We have a busy schedule for you this weekend,’ she said, handing me an agenda that stretched out for the next seven days. I would have gotten quite a bit of sleep that night, but for the thin wall and the pounding it took as my neighbors slammed each other up against it for what seemed like a very long time. I had never heard anything like it. In the morning, I saw the two men on the balcony, clean-shaven and tidily dressed, enjoying their newspaper and coffee, occasionally stroking each other’s hands, before departing the Oakwood in matching Camrys. The veil was lifting from my eyes. A cliché, I know, but that’s what it felt like. They were as much a part of my education as what I picked up at Intel.

“At 3 p.m. that same Saturday, the summer solstice, Bob Noyce—himself!—picked me up and drove to San Francisco where we were going to have a picnic dinner beside the Golden Gate before heading off to see the 9:30 showing of Beach Blanket Babylon. With time to burn and both of us wanting to avoid the commercialism of Fisherman’s Wharf, he drove straight to the Presidio, parking near the South Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge. We watched surfers and windsurfers and sea lions ride the breaking swell there. Then the wind got light, as it does when the sun drops toward the horizon and the wind machine shuts down, and we began to walk under the bridge and out to Baker Beach to watch the sunset. You can’t do that anymore, but you could do it then. He told me about jumping off of buildings, and of flying jets, and of some other exploits, and as we walked, we happened upon a couple of guys dragging a sculpture. Bob asked me, ‘Is he carrying a cross?’ But it wasn’t a cross; it was a man, an eight- or nine-foot wood sculpture of a man. They were looking for a place to prop it up, after which they were going to light it on fire.

“We talked to them, listening to their tale, which was none too clear—something about love lost and suffering—of why they were doing this, as we helped them find and put into place plenty of kindling. Bob even lit the thing with his already-lit cigarette.

“People love fire, especially fire at night, and from all over the beach, and even the hillside above the beach, the grateful came over to share the light and the heat and to participate in the spontaneous little community that formed. Burning Man! Incredible. My first full day in California.”

“What’s Burning Man?” I asked, still very young in that Orrigenal summer when I first heard this story. Vladik didn’t tell me then.

Noyce had lunch with him a couple of times after that, in the unassuming class-free company cafeteria, in the small section set aside for smokers. The elder told the younger about his own youth, in Iowa, and of hunger, and of doing something wonderful, and of the deadening effect inherited wealth had on the spirit.

There was no precedent for retaining Vladik, a promising high school student, after ten weeks. So, even though he had laid down the strategy for the next several years of compiler development for the world’s most widely used microprocessors, and even though he wanted to stay, his managers tried to convince him that he’d be best served by completing high school and college. They promised him work the next summer and sent him back to Summit, New Jersey.

Vladik returned, had to return, but not to school.

When Vladik called Jay and told him he was about to quit high school, Jay told Jenk and Jenk made a visit, his first ever, to Vladik’s home. With the full heft of his ceo -ness, Jenk tried to persuade him to find another way. “Look, son, you’re going to be the valedictorian of your class. I couldn’t buy that honor for my own kids.” No logic or reason of Jenk’s, or of Vladik’s own distinguished parents, or of their even more distinguished friends, could overturn his determination to quit. Vanechka, his mother, cried. His father, Yuli, shouted, and wanted to hit him, but he wasn’t the hitting type, or to lock him up and force him to continue at school, but he wasn’t the incarcerating type, so, after shouting, he cried, too.

With a little of the money he had earned at Intel, Vladik took the high school equivalency exams, receiving perfect scores on all five of them. Then he began a period of itinerancy.