Dealers of Lightning (21 page)

Computers look smart, but their intelligence is a fraud, a sleight-
of-hand stunt abetted by blinding speed and a capacity for infinite reiter­ation. They must be instructed how to perform every tiny step of a
problem of ratiocination, and in what sequence. That is why nothing that
ever happens inside a computer is entirely unexpected (unless it is going
wrong). The
machine has been
shown the
way by its programmer, like a
child
taken for a stroll along a garden path. Both partners know the rules
of
the
journey.
Let
the programmer
stray
one step off the path
—
let's say
by coding a command that violates the machine's logic
—
and the com­
puter
will refuse to follow.
Let
the
computer
break the rules—refusing to
take the
next step along the mandated
path—
and the programmer will
know
it is sick and must be cured
before they
can take
even
one more
stride together.

Obviously,
then, programmers
must conform
to
a
system.
They
instruct
the
machine
to
follow a series
of conditions
(if
such-and-such a condition
is
met,
do
this;
otherwise do
that.
. . .
If
you
have done
that,
and such-
and-such a state also exists, do
this;
else
that).
But
the conditions must
themselves conform to logic
that has been burned
into the machine's cir­cuits by the designer, or it will
not comprehend.
Computer programming
is
the
process of telling a computer in its
own
language how to
read
and
follow this
cascade of "ifs."
The programmer
establishes a set of rules
that
happen
to conform in a very
fundamental way to
the machine's own.
It
is
the ultimate recursive endeavor,
the joint discovery
of rules and regula­tions leading to the invention of
more rules and
regulations that allow the
machine to extend
and expand
its abilities and,
consequently, those
of
its
programmer and user. Alan
Kay
would
become
an expert in this partner­
ship
(and in
a
related field, the programming of programmers; but that
lay far in
the future).

But there
is a marvelous catch:
These logical
rules and regulations can
apply
to any abstract conditions the programmer chooses to define.
As
Kay put
it years later: "Computers' use of symbols, like the use of symbols
in
language and mathematics, is sufficiently disconnected from the real
world
to enable them to create splendid nonsense
...
Although the hard­
ware
of the computer is subject
to
natural laws (electrons can move
through the circuits only in certain physically defined ways), the range of
simulations the computer can perfonn is bounded only by the limits of
human imagination.
In
a computer, spacecraft can be made to travel
faster
than
the speed of light, time to travel in reverse."

His
enchantment with a system so rigidly structured
yet
infinitely
malleable may have had to do with his childhood in the bosom
of
a
close but itinerant family. One year after his birth in 1940 in Spring­field, Massachusetts, the family had moved to Australia, his father's
native land. Only four years later they were on the move again, fleeing
a Japanese fleet that had already reached New Guinea and seemed
prepared to continue its way south without resistance. Back in the
United States the Kays took up residence in the Hadley, Massachu­setts, farmhouse of Alan's maternal grandfather. He was Clifton John­son, a writer, musician, and pioneering documentary photographer
early in the century. In this farmhouse Kay's education began.

Clifton Johnson had died the year of Alan's birth, inspiring a family
fancy that the old man's inquisitive and creative temperament had
been infused into the grandson's. More prosaically, Johnson had filled
the house with books, five thousand of them, addressing every topic
under the sun. Alan reached first grade as a five-year-old autodidact.
"By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred
books. I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I
had already been exposed to other points of view. They didn't like the
idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle."

There were some respites from the combat. One was music, taught
to him by his mother, who had received her own musical training from
Johnson himself. But otherwise the contest continued through his
entire school career. This ranged, thanks to his father's career as a uni­versity scientist and a physiologist, from the elite Brooklyn Technical
High School to public school in Port Washington on suburban Long
Island. There were sickly periods leading to further self-education,
including a bad bout of rheumatic fever in his senior year of high
school, and further contentiousness (a dismissal for insubordination in
Brooklyn).

Port Washington in Kay's recollection was a community suffused with
music. "This was a place where football players played in the band and
orchestra for status. It was the tiling. The Congregational Church had five
choirs, each with 100 voices. I'll never forget Easter, when they'd combine
the choirs for sunrise services. Full orchestra. Five hundred voices. The
best, best stuff." There he also met Chris Jeffers, who would introduce
him to his first computer. Jeffers was a junior, a year behind Kay (although
since Kay’s illness lost him a year of school, they graduated together). He
was also a superb pianist with perfect pitch and a thriving jazz band. Kay
joined up on guitar. The band played Dixieland jazz from Jeffers s effort­less arrangements, an interesting choice if one is looking for a form drat
imposes strict formal rules on players who are encouraged to break them
according to another set of strict formal rules.

They split for college, Jeffers to the University of Colorado and Kay
to Bethany College, a small West Virginia school with a decent pro­gram in biology. Academic disaster reunited them. As Kay tells the
story, Bethany took umbrage at his charge that the administration
imposed a Jewish quota to control the number of New Yorkers in its
pre-medical program. The dean instructed him not to return to cam­pus after Easter recess. Kay called Jeffers, unaware that his friend had
himself been suspended for spending all his time on a student musical
production instead of classwork.

"Guess what, Chris," Kay said. "I just got thrown out of school!"

"Great, me too! When you coming out?"

Jeffers had decided to stay in Denver, taking a job at the national
reservations office of United Airlines, a vast computer depot located
near Stapleton International Airport, until he could resume his educa­tion. The two friends took up residence in the basement of a con­demned building not far from the end of the runway. Kay found work
in a music store, where he could wait for lightning to jolt him into the
next stage of his life.

One day Jeffers invited him to visit United. Kay understood comput­ers in the abstract, the way curious kids understood them in the days
when the most modest machine represented a ten-million-dollar capi­tal investment. United's IBM 305 RAMAC was the first one he ever
touched. It was huge, specifically designed to manage colossal data­bases like the fifty-two weeks' worth of reservations and seating
records consigned to Denver's safekeeping. But what really struck Kay
was the primitiveness of its operational routine. The system was ser­viced by platoons of attendants, full-time menials doing nothing more
refined than taking stacks of punch cards from one machine and load­ing them in the next. To his amazement, digital electronics turned out
to be as mindless and labor-intensive as laying a sewer line. As Kay's
eyes followed the drones traversing the workhouse floor, the germ of
an idea took hold. There was an exorbitant discrepancy between the
purpose of the machine—which was to simplify human endeavor—
and the effort required to realize it. Kay banked the insight. He would
not begin to understand it until much later, well after the lark of taking
an Air Force aptitude test metamorphosed into a serious career choice.

The two-week IBM course he received courtesy of Conway AFB was
effective, but rudimentary. "Programming is in two parts," he said
later. "The bricklaying part, which IBM taught, and the architecture
part, which can take two or three years."

In those days every computer was different. There was nothing like
today's standardized architectures, according to which all IBM-compatible
machines, for instance, respond to the same set of operating instructions
even though they may be manufactured by different companies accord­ing to widely variant specifications of memory, data storage, and even
microprocessor design. Standardization has helped make computers a
mass-market phenomenon. It allows users to be reasonably confident
that a program bought off the shelf will work properly regardless of who
manufactured their computer, just as they know they will find the accel­erator and brake pedal in the same location regardless of whether their
car is a Ford or a Chevrolet.