Steve Lohr - Digital Revolutionaries: The Men and Women Who Brought Computing to Life

Digital
Revolutionaries

The Men and Women Who
Brought Computing to Life

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK

Digital
Revolutionaries

The Men and Women Who
Brought Computing to Life

STEVE LOHR

R OARING B ROOK P RESS
N EW Y ORK

Copyright 2009 by The New York Times
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ISBN: 978-1-59643-532-2

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Printed in August 2009 in the United States of America by RR Donnelley & Sons Company, Harrisonburg, Virginia
First Edition October 2009
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For Nikki, to give her a glimpse of the people
and technology behind her Web site.

Digital
Revolutionaries

The Men and Women Who
Brought Computing to Life

Ever wonder how computers work What goes on behind the screen and the keyboard? If so, you share important traits with the pioneers of the digital revolution. Curiosity and a sense of determination to push beyond the limits of the current technology are qualities these computer revolutionaries embody. Without their questioning minds, we might still have the room-sized computing machines of the 1940s instead of todays microcomputers. Cars might not have become the computers on wheels they are now, and we might not be able to download an MP3 file to a laptop and transfer it to an iPod. Would the iPod even exist? For every technological puzzle that begs to be solved, there is a computing geek who will try to solve it simply because it is there.

Long before people were called computer nerds, Charles Simonyi was one, as a teenager in Budapest in the 1960s. Things were very different back then. Computers didnt play music or movies. They were big machines, and they were scarce. In Communist Hungary, the government owned most computers and, through a family friend, Simonyi got an unpaid job in the computer center of a government agency. As a child, he had always been interested in mechanical things. He loved Erector sets, but parts were often hard to get in Hungary, so he built imaginary machines with the pieces he could get.

The government computer Simonyi worked on had no mouse and no screen with easy-touse graphic icons like the kind we point to and then click to make todays personal computers perform tasks. To instruct the Russian-made mainframe to do anything, Simonyi had to master the arcane art of speaking to the computer in a language understood by the machine: programming code. It was frustrating at first, but Simonyi had a real knack for it, and he was thrilled that he could program the computer to do everything from calculating statistical plans for the government to playing games of tic-tactoe and chess for fun. In a way, I found my ultimate Erector setan Erector set without limits, he recalled.

Simonyi was a strong-willed young man and an independent thinker. He despised the restraints on individual freedom under communism, and his computer skills would serve as his passport to the West. At seventeen, he left for a temporary job in Denmark, but he had no plans to return. His parents knew of his intention, and the consequences. He would not see his family again for more than twenty years. Simonyi arrived in Denmark with no money and few possessions. Still, he had a job and talents that would grow and become increasingly valuable over the years.

Simonyi emigrated to California as a student, attending the University of California at Berkeley and then earning a doctorate at Stanford University. He always worked doing computer jobs on the side to pay his way. In the 1970s, he was a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, a hothouse of ideas that later found their way into successful products.

In 1980, Simonyi showed up at a fledgling company outside Seattle: Microsoft. His reputation and work at the Xerox research center got him an immediate job offer from Bill Gates, and Simonyi became one of the early employees at Microsoft. At the Xerox lab, Simonyi had developed an innovative program for creating documents that made it possible for words to be typed in all sorts of sizes and styles, and for graphics to be inserted on the screen. At Microsoft, Simonyis ideas were put into Microsoft Word, the writing and editing program that is one of the most widely used software products in the world.

When I visited Simonyi a few years ago, we met at his house, a striking modern home of glass, steel, and wood that sweeps down a hillside to the edge of Lake Washington, near Seattle. His house has its own library, fitness center, swimming pool, and computer lab. On the walls hang original works by modern artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns. Besides art, Simonyi collects jets. He has two, including a NATO fighter jet, which he flies. Hes even flown to the International Space Station as a space tourist. He has made multimillion-dollar philanthropic donations to Oxford University, the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, and elsewhere. He is a billionaire, and he owes it all to his extraordinary ability to talk to computers in the language of programming code along with good timing and good fortune.

Charles Simonyi floats during a parabolic flight aboard a zero-gravity simulator in preparation for his flight in space.

Charles Simonyis home was profiled inThe New York Timeson August 4, 1996, along with the compounds of other technology moguls.

His life story personifies the rise of modern computing over the past fifty years, as it evolved from a lab experiment to a huge, rich industry, and from a technology for an elite few to one used by everyone. Even today, Simonyi thinks computers are still far too difficult for ordinary people to program. The computer revolution, he insists, is just getting underway.

Still, Simonyi cannot help but marvel at the pace of progress in a few decades, a very short time in the sweep of history. Even with the primitive tools we use, look at how much computing can do, he observed. Its amazing.

Its ironic that computers, developed by independent thinkers and revolutionaries, have become so commonplace, so much a part of the fabric of everyday life, that they often go unnoticed, as if hiding in plain sight. You may not see them, but chances are, theyre there. They surround usnot just personal computers at home and school, but also cell phones, handheld music players, televisions, kitchen appliances, and supermarket cash registers are computing devices of one kind or another. Cars rely as much on software and semiconductors as on gears and pistons these days. The list goes on and on.

Not so long ago, however, computers were rare things, indeed. At the dawn of modern computing in the 1940s and 1950s, computers were hulking room-sized machines. They required teams of white-suited scientists to keep them up and running. The scientists fixed them by prowling around inside the machine, seeing where some wire had come loose and plugging it into the correct circuit by hand. Yet one of those room-sized mechanical behemoths could not match the computing power of a single microchip no larger than the tip of your finger today.