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

Chapter 14 In Pursuit of Something Wonderful

Bucket list in hand, Vladik took Noyce’s advice and did something wonderful, or tried to. He lived for months in Bali. He fell in love with a Danish girl, traveled with her through South Asia, married her, separated, and filed for divorce by mutual consent, all in the same year. Hanging from a wing of his own design, he caught afternoon updrafts off the slopes in Chamonix and then floated up and around the Alps until daylight ran out. He read a lot. Each adventure began with an incandescent glow, later dulled to compact fluorescence, and then flickered out. When enthusiasm had flagged altogether or money ran out, he solved software problems for a fee before starting the next adventure. He never starved. “Not a high bar for happiness,” he said.

Thinking that maybe wonderfulness wouldn’t be found at the end of a list of entertainments, he made a new list, this one consisting of serious things, problems he hoped to make a dent in. Then, as he had sought out Intel because he had recognized that his interests and their needs overlapped, he selected his next employer on the presumption that they’d be interested in that dent, too, if he could make it. After a short stint trying to make the world safe for compressed music, he decided that wasn’t a big enough idea, and another short and unsatisfying stint looking for signs for extraterrestrial intelligence—willfully kept under wraps by the DOD, he thought—in streams of data coming off of radio telescopes, he decided to take a break from deciding exactly where satisfaction lay, accepting employment instead at a big place where there were lots of problems to solve. And so he was hired at ITSy, International Technology Systems, or as he liked to call it, the itsy bitsy machine company. Today a global leader in technology by almost any standard, it was still small enough in those days that his mentor told him, with a straight face, and in what proved to be an understatement, “In five years you’ll know everyone of significance here.”

“By a decade, at least, I was the youngest in my group, and the only one of them not to have at least a master’s degree,” he said. “They were all physicists, optical engineers, chemists and chemical engineers, trying to overcome diffraction in photolithography masks, you know, master images that are used to make chips.”

I barely knew.

“My job was to improve some old computer codes used to translate chip designs into physical masks used on the line. They were all we had, but they were not working, and we knew the codes were not working because there were all these lithographically induced chip failures. ‘Find what’s wrong,’ I was told, and I was handed this big blue book called Principles of Optics, or simply ‘Born and Wolf,’ after its authors.”

I think he was waiting for me to say something, but all I could muster was, “I’ve seen it on shelves.”

“Yeah, most people see it on the shelf but have never opened it. Whoever wrote what I’d become responsible for fixing hadn’t opened it either. Or maybe they had, but they had had too few computing resources to implement what Born and Wolf taught. I read some introductory chapters and then the chapters on diffraction. The physics wasn’t hard, even though the equations were intimidating. There were hairy integrals that accounted for all the different wavelengths of light, and all the different angles at which it would be incident, and for the phases and the bending and all that. The old code had made too many approximations because it would have been too expensive, compute-wise, to do it right. I drew a flow chart explaining what we had to do, and what was not being done in the company’s code, and how the change might improve things for a bunch of designers and manufacturing engineers, and make our products better at lower cost. Our group decided to do a little test, which required me to prototype the software for an idealized case. It worked great, and then the whole thing was taken away from us because we were a research group and we’d done our piece. They needed some industrial-strength solution, and we could never have given it to them.” He paused. “I can talk about this stuff forever, but why I am telling you this now?”