Paul was nineteen. Down in the converted garage, he began to code his own electronic game, on the VIC-20 and from scratch. He called the game Cupid. When he was done, it worked this way: The code drew a green field on the computer screen, then populated the field with five pink hearts, a green “ugly pill,” and a circular face that represented Cupid, the player’s alter ego. You moved Cupid around with a joystick, gobbling up the pink hearts while avoiding the arrows that shot across the screen horizontally and vertically. You, Cupid, could get killed by those arrows. You could also get blocked by them. Arrows that missed you would form latticed fences, hemming you in. But if you got Cupid positioned on top of an ugly pill, you turned green and also rubbery, and for a time you could squeeze through the fences of arrows. When you squeezed through, the program would make the computer produce a sound like the popping of a champagne cork. Paul spent a lot of time on the sound effects and on trying to code the behavior of pieces so they seemed like analogs of natural movements. Coding the sounds and the graphics was the kind of job programmers call “nontrivial,” and it was equally hard to synchronize them.
Programming had come a long way by the time Paul made his game. Computers are created with the built-in power to execute certain basic instructions, such as commands to add and subtract, and to perform operations that direct the flow of a program. These instructions are conveyed to the computer as discrete packages of high and low voltages, represented in what is called “machine language,” a code that amounts to long skeins of zeros and ones. It is extraordinarily difficult to write programs in machine language. In the 1950s, not long after the creation of the first automatic digital computers, a system of symbols, another sort of code, was developed to represent those packages of zeros and ones. This system was called assembly language. It was easier to write than machine code but cumbersome at best.
The great step forward in programming came in the 1960s with the development of “high-level” languages. To give some sense of their power, imagine that Paul had been trying to create the standard beginner’s program and tell his VIC-20 to print “Hello, World.” Here is an example (produced by a program called the GNU C compiler) of what a part of a Hello, World program would have looked like, if Paul had written it in assembly language:
.file “hello.c”
.section .rodata
.LC0:
.string “hello, worldn”
.text
.globl main
.type main, @function
main:
.LFB0:
.cfi_startproc
pushl %ebp
.cfi_def_cfa_offset 8
.cfi_offset 5, -8
movl %esp, %ebp
.cfi_def_cfa_register 5
andl $-16, %esp
subl $16, %esp
movl $.LC0, (%esp)
call printf
leave
.cfi_restore 5
.cfi_def_cfa 4, 4
ret
.cfi_endproc
.LFE0:
.size main, .-main
.ident “GCC: (GNU) 4.8.3”
.section .note.GNU-stack,”“,@progbits
And here, by contrast, is the entire “Hello, World” program that Paul could have written in the early 1980s, using the VIC-20’s built-in high-level language BASIC:
10 PRINT “Hello World!”
High-level languages allowed a coder to do vastly more in fewer lines of code. Fewer lines of code also made for fewer bugs in programs, and this too was significant. The gigantic programs soon to come could never have been written in assembly language. And they could never have been debugged well enough to be usable.
Paul’s brother Ed was obliged to code Frogger in assembly language. So when Paul coded Cupid, he had it easier than Ed. But BASIC was an early and rather rudimentary high-level language, not easily bent to creating complex things such as sound effects. And like Ed with Frogger, Paul had to cram a great deal of functionality into a very small space. Ed had coded his Mona Lisa with only 4 kilobytes’ worth of read-only memory chips. Paul, too, had to fit the Cupid program into 4 kilobytes of computer memory—and he had that much only because he found a way to borrow 500 bytes from the VIC-20’s preloaded programs. These were small numbers even then, and minuscule a few decades later, when a smartphone that cost about as much as a VIC-20 contained memory circuits that could hold sixteen million times more data.
Donald Knuth writes: “One rather curious thing I’ve noticed about aesthetic satisfaction is that our pleasure is significantly enhanced when we accomplish something with limited tools.” This was one source of the pleasure Paul felt when he finished Cupid. Indeed, he loved the whole procedure of creating programs. You write the code that should create a 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 oil. So at those times when his father told the children they were going to kill their mother if they didn’t quiet down, Paul knew that it was true.
His father’s rules, as Paul understood them, were simple: no noise in the house and no motorcycle riding. He tried to be a good boy at home. School was another matter. When he arrived at first grade at St. Theresa’s, he felt a certain freedom: “Inside my house it’s strict. Outside my house I can do what I want.” He liked to play little tricks on his young teacher. She often gave the class written quizzes. Paul would rush through them, getting all the answers right. She would still be handing out copies of the quiz when he finished his. Then he’d run up to her desk and smack his paper down beside her blotter. That poor young thing quit teaching after a year of him, Paul’s mother said. He didn’t believe it, but it might have been true.
At the end of that school year, according to family lore, the head nun at St. Theresa’s told his mother, “Paul is a very special child. We believe he belongs at another school.” In the seven years between nursery school and Boston Latin, Paul changed schools seven times. For some of those years he was placed in classes for the gifted and talented, but even then he usually felt cooped up and bored, and wherever he went he served time in detention.
When he was ten years old, his mother went to a Catholic priest who was said to have the power to heal those with great faith. She recovered and was never sick again. Of course, some feelings from that time remained with Paul. Some he carried through childhood in recurring memories: the times of stony silence between his parents, for example. After one tense morning, he was walking his little sister down Perham Street to school. She was crying. He was holding her hand, and he was crying, too, and ashamed of it because he was supposed to be her protector.
One memorable evening, Paul was sitting in the living room, watching his father watch TV, when someone outside started banging on the front door. His father opened it onto a tall, beefy, snarling man. “Your son beat the shit out of my son!” Paul’s father was about six feet tall but wiry thin, much smaller than the man in the doorway. And yet, without any hesitation, Paul’s father poked a finger in the man’s chest and said, “Don’t you ever bang on my door again!” And instantly, the big angry guy got quiet. He actually apologized. How did his dad do that? It seemed as if his dad had access to a magical power, like the power possessed by the good guys, the Jedis, in the Star Wars movies.
Once restored to health, Paul’s mother was unquestionably in charge of the household. She cooked all the meals and served them at hours she appointed, and she never asked her husband for help in the kitchen or with the laundry or the cleaning, nor did he offer any. But she had never played the submissive housewife beloved by advertisers of the 1950s and ’60s. She had gone to college, while Paul and his siblings suspected that their father had never finished high school. After her cure, Paul’s mother became increasingly independent. “She decided to live again,” Paul’s brother Tim remembered, adding that it was also the mid-1970s, “the era when women were stepping out.” She started playing tennis. She worked as a volunteer docent at the Boston Public Library and the Arnold Arboretum, adjacent to West Roxbury. She began to study the family genealogy as a hobby. She also worked as a substitute teacher, and one day, to everyone’s surprise, she announced that she was going to buy her own car.
Paul’s father argued with her. They had a family car, an old Plymouth Grand Fury, which she could use whenever she wanted.
She said, “I’m getting my own car.”
She chose a standard shift, not an automatic, and most astonishing of all, she chose a Honda—“a damned foreign car,” Paul’s father said.
She knew a lot about a lot of things, such as birds and botany and classical music. She was the one who insisted on buying a piano for the house and who arranged music lessons for the younger children, lessons that Paul, alone among his siblings, relished. In Paul’s baby book, his mother wrote of him at three years old: “Doesn’t ride trike much now, but has constant interest in trucks & cars. Always busy & never bored. Very friendly child. Seldom indoors—plays with anyone. Amazing conversationalist. We love to hear him talk—tells us stories. Great imagination. Wants to grow ‘bigger’ so he can touch the sky. Wants to be superman & runs around with towel-cape.” Clearly, she felt affection for him, but even after her cure, he never felt great warmth from her. Maybe there were just too many children and not enough of her to go around.
In any case, it was mainly his father to whom Paul looked for guidance. His father could be gruff, and sometimes Paul imagined anger radiating from him, along with the sweet smell from the cocktail glass on the table by the easy chair. But his father wasn’t a drunk and wasn’t usually angry, and when he was, Paul would try, even as a schoolboy, to imagine what it must be like to work all day and come home to seven noisy kids and a sick wife. And his dad had a shiny side. He was a prankster and a great storyteller, especially at the dinner table. There was this guy at Boston Gas who boasted endlessly about the good mileage he got from his Volkswagen. If he had served in World War II in Europe, as Paul’s father had, he would never have bought a German car. How to stop the guy’s boasting? Well, Paul’s father said, every day for about a week he sneaked out to the parking lot and poured gas into the VW’s fuel tank, and then when the guy began telling everyone that his car’s great mileage was actually increasing, Paul’s father started siphoning gas out of the fuel tank. And then, just to top things off, he and some other men from work sneaked over to the fellow’s house one night, lifted the Volkswagen over his fence, and left it sitting in his front yard.
Paul’s father was a second-generation Irish American, son of a woman who had come from Ireland as a teenager. For a time she had worked as a servant for a lace-curtain Irish family who insisted that she walk several paces behind them when they went to church in their finery. Paul’s father was only eighteen when his own father died, and to support his mother and five sisters he had gone to work as an apprentice pipe fitter for Boston Gas. No one without a college degree, Paul gathered, had ever risen as high in that company as his father. Once when Paul was still in grade school, his father took him to lunch with some other midlevel executives. Paul felt shy in the company of those strangers, and it worried him when his father ordered first one Manhattan and then another. It seemed like a lot to drink at lunch, but the other men had drinks, too, and it was clear that his dad was someone they looked up to, from the way they bent forward when he talked, from the hearty way they laughed at his jokes. Paul wished he could be like that, sure of himself, the life of the party.
On weekends and evenings, his father always seemed to have a do-it-yourself project, and Paul and his next-older brother, Danny, were usually eager to help, starting from the time when they were still very young and their father praised them for being good at holding flashlights while he worked on the furnace. Soon he was teaching them how to sweat pipes and snake wires behind walls and fix carburetors. He helped them build a clubhouse behind the garage.
Paul’s father also made a small side business out of buying, repairing, and selling used appliances. It made sense that a man with seven kids would look to make some extra money, but Paul soon realized that this business was mostly a game his father played, for the sake of the hunt and the sport of bargaining. His father would check the pap
er for announcements of dates when the wealthy nearby towns of Newton and Brookline were going to pick up residents’ discarded appliances. He’d head for those suburbs on the evenings before the scheduled pickups, bringing one or two of his older sons to help him with the heavy lifting. When he found a fairly new washing machine sitting at the curb, he and his boys would load it into the old family station wagon. He’d take the machine to Perham Street and fix it. “Nine times out of ten there’s just a piece of underwear wrapped around the spinner,” he’d say. Once he had the machine repaired, he’d put it up for sale in one of the local papers or in The Want Advertiser, which he also studied regularly, looking for used cars and appliances to buy.
By the time Paul became a regular on the buying trips, his dad was mainly dealing in window-mounted air conditioners, much easier for a man with an aging back to lift and put in the car. His dad’s general scheme was to buy the ACs in late fall or winter, repair them when he had the time, and wait until the hot days of summer to sell them. He made many of his purchases at yard sales. Paul studied his techniques. Say his dad liked the looks of an air-conditioning unit on sale for a hundred dollars. He’d go up to the owner, and he’d start by cracking a joke. Maybe the seller would say, by way of claiming that the AC unit in question was virtually brand-new, “I bought it for my aunt, and she passed away.” Paul’s dad would smile. “Well, she probably needs air-conditioning where she is now.”
Paul imagined the other party thinking Who is this guy? His dad was trying to catch the seller off guard, Paul thought. Then right away, his dad would name a price, always a crazy number: “I’ll give you three dollars for that piece of junk.” And surprisingly often the seller would say, “Oh. I guess.” To Paul it seemed as if, having been thrown off balance, the seller needed something tangible, like a number, to get steadied.