sound effect, you load it into the machine, and it doesn’t work. So you study your code, you find the flaw in it, you run it again, and you keep on repeating the process until the machine does what you want. All the while you’ve been wrestling with the size of that code, striving to make it small enough to fit the computer’s memory. You find ways to shorten it, and when at last it’s concise enough and runs perfectly, you feel as if you’ve done something more than re-create the popping of a champagne cork.
Ed was astonished when Paul demonstrated the game for him. Engineers are known for frankness, a tendency that in Ed’s case overcame sibling rivalry. “Wow!” he said. Then he told Paul, “Listen, there are companies paying real money for this stuff.” With Ed’s help, Paul sold Cupid to a company called Games by Apollo for $25,000. The company made a down payment of $5,000, then went out of business, but Paul wasn’t very disappointed. He retrieved the rights to his game and used the $5,000 advance to buy a new Apple II personal computer, a printer, a floppy disk drive, and a “ROM oven”—a device for burning programs into integrated circuits, which he first used to make copies of Cupid for friends. He also bought a modem and talked his parents into paying for a second phone line, which he connected to his new modem in his basement bedroom.
The Internet was young. You had to search out correspondents. He went to one of the first meetings of the Boston Computer Society, where other enthusiasts handed out the phone numbers to their modems, and then he went home to his room and figured out how to write the code to connect his new computer to theirs. Modems worked slowly, which gave human eyes time to see how astonishing the process was. He would watch the files he was sending disappear gradually from his screen, and watch incoming files materialize bit by bit, as if they were being painted on an electronic canvas.
He was witnessing amazing things and also making them happen. Now and then he would hear sounds of the life of the house. The pipes to the water heater would start thumping, or there would be footsteps in the kitchen overhead. Upstairs, all the emotions of a big family were swirling around—arguments, many competing sorrows—and there was nothing he could do up there to change what worried and upset him. But he could always figure out how to tell the computer to do what he wanted, and it didn’t argue back or ignore him. In his dark basement room, it could be any time of day or night, and when he was coding or watching a message being painted on his screen, he felt as though there was no other time than now and no other place but the small universe he was creating in his current program, a place where he was in charge, a refuge inside a refuge.
“I lived in my mind as a kid,” Paul once said. He was still a small child when he began, on occasion, to see strange and wonderful apparitions in his bedroom. They usually appeared when he was just waking up. He would look at the clock on the face of his radio and it would have grown gigantic, and the outlet in the wall across the room would be six feet tall. He’d try to keep the wall socket just as big as a door, the clock as big as the moon, until eventually they shrank to their usual boring sizes. He didn’t tell his parents about this. It wasn’t exactly his secret. For a long time he assumed it wasn’t worth mentioning, because it must be something everyone experienced.
There was reason to be quiet in his household. For Paul’s first ten years, his mother was sick. She suffered from myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disease that causes muscle weakness, sometimes in the muscles used in breathing. It is debilitating but only rarely fatal, and it wasn’t as though she was sick all the time, but in bed at night Paul saw images of a wheelchair in the living room, an ambulance outside, a priest at the front door carrying his kit of sacred
Ed was astonished when Paul demonstrated the game for him. Engineers are known for frankness, a tendency that in Ed’s case overcame sibling rivalry. “Wow!” he said. Then he told Paul, “Listen, there are companies paying real money for this stuff.” With Ed’s help, Paul sold Cupid to a company called Games by Apollo for $25,000. The company made a down payment of $5,000, then went out of business, but Paul wasn’t very disappointed. He retrieved the rights to his game and used the $5,000 advance to buy a new Apple II personal computer, a printer, a floppy disk drive, and a “ROM oven”—a device for burning programs into integrated circuits, which he first used to make copies of Cupid for friends. He also bought a modem and talked his parents into paying for a second phone line, which he connected to his new modem in his basement bedroom.
The Internet was young. You had to search out correspondents. He went to one of the first meetings of the Boston Computer Society, where other enthusiasts handed out the phone numbers to their modems, and then he went home to his room and figured out how to write the code to connect his new computer to theirs. Modems worked slowly, which gave human eyes time to see how astonishing the process was. He would watch the files he was sending disappear gradually from his screen, and watch incoming files materialize bit by bit, as if they were being painted on an electronic canvas.
He was witnessing amazing things and also making them happen. Now and then he would hear sounds of the life of the house. The pipes to the water heater would start thumping, or there would be footsteps in the kitchen overhead. Upstairs, all the emotions of a big family were swirling around—arguments, many competing sorrows—and there was nothing he could do up there to change what worried and upset him. But he could always figure out how to tell the computer to do what he wanted, and it didn’t argue back or ignore him. In his dark basement room, it could be any time of day or night, and when he was coding or watching a message being painted on his screen, he felt as though there was no other time than now and no other place but the small universe he was creating in his current program, a place where he was in charge, a refuge inside a refuge.
“I lived in my mind as a kid,” Paul once said. He was still a small child when he began, on occasion, to see strange and wonderful apparitions in his bedroom. They usually appeared when he was just waking up. He would look at the clock on the face of his radio and it would have grown gigantic, and the outlet in the wall across the room would be six feet tall. He’d try to keep the wall socket just as big as a door, the clock as big as the moon, until eventually they shrank to their usual boring sizes. He didn’t tell his parents about this. It wasn’t exactly his secret. For a long time he assumed it wasn’t worth mentioning, because it must be something everyone experienced.
There was reason to be quiet in his household. For Paul’s first ten years, his mother was sick. She suffered from myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disease that causes muscle weakness, sometimes in the muscles used in breathing. It is debilitating but only rarely fatal, and it wasn’t as though she was sick all the time, but in bed at night Paul saw images of a wheelchair in the living room, an ambulance outside, a priest at the front door carrying his kit of sacred
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