when I was around thirteen, I started hanging out with a group of boys
who met up for regular long hikes in the mountains around Seattle.
We got to know each other as Boy Scouts. We did plenty of hiking and
camping with our troop, but very quickly we formed a sort of splinter group
that went on our own expeditions—and that’s how we thought of them, as
expeditions. We wanted more freedom and more risk than the trips the
Scouts offered.
There were usually five of us—Mike, Rocky, Reilly, Danny, and me.
Mike was the leader; he was a few years older than the rest of us and had
vastly more outdoor experience. Over the course of three years or so, we
hiked hundreds of miles together. We covered the Olympic National Forest
west of Seattle and Glacier Peak Wilderness to the northeast and did hikes
along the Pacific Coast. We’d often go for seven days or more at a stretch,
guided only by topographic maps through old-growth forests and rocky
beaches where we tried to time the tides as we hustled around points. During
school breaks, we’d take off on extended trips, hiking and camping in all
weather, which in the Pacific Northwest often meant a week of soaked, itchy
Army surplus wool pants and pruney toes. We weren’t doing technical
climbing. No ropes or slings or sheer rock faces. Just long, hard hikes. It
wasn’t dangerous beyond the fact that we were teenagers deep in the
mountains, many hours from help and well before cell phones were a thing.
Over time we grew into a confident, tight-knit team. We’d finish a full day
of hiking, decide upon a place to camp, and with hardly a word we’d all fall
into our jobs. Mike and Rocky might tie up the tarp that would be our roof
for the night. Danny foraged the undergrowth for dry wood, and Reilly and I
coaxed a starter stick and twigs into our fire for the night.
And then we ate. Cheap food that was light in our packs but substantial
enough to fuel us through the trip. Nothing ever tasted better. For dinner we’d
chop up a brick of Spam and mix it with Hamburger Helper or a packet of
beef Stroganoff mix. In the morning, we might have Carnation Instant
Breakfast mix or a powder that with water transformed into a western omelet,
at least according to the package. My morning favorite: Oscar Mayer Smokie
Links, a sausage billed as “all meat,” now extinct. We used a single frying pan
to prepare most of the food, and we ate out of empty #10 coffee cans we each
carried. Those cans were our water pails, our saucepans, our oatmeal bowls. I
don’t know who among us invented the hot raspberry drink. Not that it was a
great culinary innovation: just add instant Jell-O mix to boiling water and
drink. It worked as dessert or as a morning sugar boost before a day of
hiking.
We were away from our parents and the control of any adults, making our
own decisions about where to go, what to eat, when we slept, judging for
ourselves what risks to take. At school, none of us were the cool kids. Only
Danny played an organized sport—basketball—and he soon quit that to make
time for our hikes. I was the skinniest of the group and usually the coldest,
and I always felt like I was weaker than the others. Still, I liked the physical
challenge, and the feeling of autonomy. While hiking was becoming popular
in our part of the country, not a lot of teenagers were traipsing off in the
woods for eight days on their own.
That said, it was the 1970s, and attitudes toward parenting were looser
than they are today. Kids generally had more freedom. And by the time I was
in my early teens, my parents had accepted that I was different from many of
my peers and had come to terms with the fact that I needed a certain amount
of independence in making my way through the world. That acceptance had
been hard-won—especially for my mother—but it would play a defining part
in who I was to become.
Looking back on it now, I’m sure all of us were searching for something
on those trips beyond camaraderie and a sense of accomplishment. We were
at that age when kids test their limits, experiment with different identities—
and also sometimes feel a yearning for bigger, even transcendent experiences.
I had started to feel a clear longing to figure out what my path would be. I
wasn’t sure what direction it would take, but it had to be something
interesting and consequential.
Also in those years, I was spending a lot of time with a different group of
boys. Kent, Paul, Ric, and I all went to the same school, Lakeside, which had
set up a way for students to connect with a big mainframe computer over a
phone line. It was incredibly rare back then for teenagers to have access to a
computer in any form. The four of us really took to it, devoting all our free
time to writing increasingly more sophisticated programs and exploring what
we could do with that electronic machine.
On the surface, the difference between hiking and programming couldn’t
have been greater. But they each felt like an adventure. With both sets of
friends I was exploring new worlds, traveling to places even most adults
couldn’t reach. Like hiking, programming fit me because it allowed me to
define my own measure of success and it seemed limitless, not determined by
how fast I could run or how far I could throw. The logic, focus, and stamina
needed to write long, complicated programs came naturally to me. Unlike in
hiking, among that group of friends, I was the leader.
—
Toward the end of my sophomore year, in June 1971, Mike called me with
our next trip: fifty miles in the Olympic Mountains. The route he chose was
called the Press Expedition Trail, after a group sponsored by a newspaper that
had explored the area in 1890. Did he mean the same trip on which the men
nearly starved to death and their clothes rotted on their bodies? Yes, but that
was a long time ago, he said.
Eight decades later it would still be a tough hike; that year had brought a
lot of snow, so it was a particularly daunting proposition. But since everyone
else—Rocky, Reilly, and Danny—was up for it, there was no way I was going
to wimp out. Plus, a younger scout, a guy named Chip, was game. I had to go.
The plan was to climb the Low Divide pass, descend to the Quinault
River, and then hike the same trail back, staying each night in log shelters
along the way. Six or seven days total. The first day was easy and we spent the
night in a beautiful snow-covered meadow. Over the next day or two, as we
climbed the Low Divide, the snow got deeper. When we reached the spot
where we planned to spend the night, the shelter was buried in snow. I
enjoyed a moment of private elation. Surely, I thought, we’d backtrack, head
down to a far more welcoming shelter we had passed earlier in the day. We’d
make a fire, get warm, and eat.
Mike said we’d take a vote: head back or push on to our final destination.
Either choice meant a several-hour hike. “We passed a shelter at the bottom;
it’s eighteen hundred feet down. We could go back down and stay there, or we
could continue on to the Quinault River,” Mike said. He didn’t need to spell
out that going back meant aborting our mission to reach the river.
“What do you think, Dan?” Mike asked. Danny was the unofficial second
in command in our little group. He was taller than everyone else, and a very
capable hiker with long legs that never seemed to tire. Whatever he said
would sway the vote.
“Well, we’re almost there, maybe we should just go on,” Danny said. As
the hands went up, it was clear I was in the minority. We’d push on.
A few minutes down the trail I said, “Danny, I’m not happy with you. You
could have stopped this.” I was joking—sort of.
I remember this trip for how cold and miserable I felt that day. I also
remember it for what I did next. I retreated into my own thoughts.
I pictured computer code.
Around that time, someone had loaned Lakeside a computer called a
PDP-8, made by Digital Equipment Corp. This was 1971, and while I was
deep into the nascent world of computers, I had never seen anything like it.
Up until then, my friends and I had used only huge mainframe computers that
were simultaneously shared with other people. We usually connected to them
over a phone line or else they were locked in a separate room. But the PDP-8
was designed to be used directly by one person and was small enough to sit on
the desk next to you. It was probably the closest thing in its day to the
personal computers that would be common a decade or so later—though one
that weighed eighty pounds and cost $8,500. For a challenge, I decided I
would try to write a version of the BASIC programming language for the new
computer.
Before the hike I was working on the part of the program that would tell
the computer the order in which it should perform operations when someone
inputs an expression such as 3(2 + 5) x 8 − 3, or wants to create a game that
requires complex math. In programming that feature is called a formula
evaluator. Trudging along with my eyes on the ground in front of me, I
worked on my evaluator, puzzling through the steps needed to perform the
operations. Small was key. Computers back then had very little memory,
which meant programs had to be lean, written using as little code as possible
so as not to hog memory. The PDP-8 had just 6 kilobytes of the memory a
computer uses to store data that it’s working on. I’d picture the code and then
try to trace how the computer would follow my commands. The rhythm of
walking helped me think, much like a habit I had of rocking in place. For the
rest of that day my mind was immersed in my coding puzzle. As we
descended to the valley floor, the snow gave way to a gently sloping trail
through an old forest of spruce and fir trees until we reached the river, set up
camp, ate our Spam Stroganoff, and finally slept.
By early the next morning we were climbing back up the Low Divide in
heavy wind and sleet that whipped sideways in our faces. We stopped under a
tree long enough to share a sleeve of Ritz crackers and continued. Every
camp we found was full of other hikers waiting out the storm. So we just kept
going, adding more hours to an interminable day. Crossing a stream, Chip fell
and gashed his knee. Mike cleaned the wound and applied butterfly bandages;
now we moved only as fast as Chip limped. All the while, I silently honed my
code. I hardly spoke a word during the twenty miles we hiked that day.
Eventually we came to a shelter that had room for us and set up camp.
Like the famous line “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not
have the time,” it’s easier to write a program in sloppy code that goes on for
pages than to write the same program on a single page. The sloppy version
may also run more slowly and use more memory. Over the course of that
hike, I had the time to write short. On that long day I slimmed it down more,
like whittling little pieces off a stick to sharpen the point. What I made
seemed efficient and pleasingly simple. It was by far the best code I had ever
written.
As we made our way back to the trailhead the next afternoon, the rain
finally gave way to clear skies and the warmth of sunlight. I felt the elation
that always hit me after a hike, when all the hard work was behind me.
—
By the time school started again in the fall, whoever had lent us the PDP-8
had reclaimed it. I never finished my BASIC project. But the code I wrote on
that hike, my formula evaluator, and its beauty stayed with me.
Three and a half years later, I was a sophomore in college not sure of my
path in life when Paul, one of my Lakeside friends, burst into my dorm room
with news of a groundbreaking computer. I knew we could write a BASIC
language for it; we had a head start. The first thing I did was to think back to
that miserable day on the Low Divide and retrieve from my memory the
evaluator code I had written. I typed it into a computer, and with that planted
the seed of what would become one of the world’s largest companies and the
beginning of a new industry