A lot of card games are based on “tricks” where one person puts a card down and the other players follow with their own cards, and the highest-ranking card of the suit of the first card down wins. That’s a trick. Now, in hearts, you try to avoid taking certain cards: for example, eveiy heart you win in a trick counts against you. In spades, you have a round of bidding first, betting how many tricks you and your partner—the person across the table from you in a game of four players—will take. If you bet five tricks and get that many, you get fifty points. But if you overbid and don’t get as many tricks as you thought you would, you lose that many points. In spades, all of the spades have the special ability to trump the other cards.
But bridge is at the top end. You not only bet how many tricks you can take with your partner, whose hand you cannot see, but you also have to bet which suit will be the trump suit that beats all other suits.
Bridge is such a good balance of strategy and offense and defense. And at the same time, you’re looking at your hand and trying to guess what others might have and passing signals for the bidding. You have to play on so many levels at once. We really
started out, like I said, knowing nothing. So we all had fun, since we were all playing at the same level.
But it’s funny, we thought we were real bridge players, but we never could’ve gotten around and competed with real bridge players. A few years later when I was working at Hewlett-Packard, I tried to join a bridge club in my apartment building and I couldn’t even begin to play with those women. You see, I’d never really memorized all those rules of how much you bid when you have which hands. So all I’d end up doing is messing up my partner.
These days, I can play bridge pretty well, but it’s only because I read the bridge column in the newspaper every single day for years until I could figure out the formulas in my head.
• o •
During college, I worked on one of my favorite projects ever. I called it the TV Jammer.
The TV Jammer came out of this thing I’d seen my old friend Allen Baum’s father, Elmer, do over the summer. Mr. Baum was an engineer, and he’d worked out this little circuit on a piece of paper. It included a transistor, a couple of resistors, a capacitor, and a coil that could put out a signal in the TV frequency range. I looked at it, thinking how cool it would be if you could tune it, the same way you could tune your transistor radio, just by turning a dial. So I built a few of these—devices that let you jam a TV if you just dialed into the right frequency. They were cool.
Well, at some point during my freshman year at Colorado, I thought it was time to have fun with the TV Jammer. I walked over to Radio Shack and looked at all their transistors. I saw they had only one transistor rated for 50 MHz up toward the TV frequencies. I brought that one home. I also bought a little transistor radio so I could use parts of it, like resistors of certain values and the tuning capacitor, the part the tuning knob connects to. That would give me a big wide tuning range.
I hand-wrapped a coil out of some thick wire I had—about three turns—and I soldered on a little tap halfway down one of the turns and put a capacitor there. The whole thing was as small as my little finger, just tiny. I built it on top of the case of a 9-volt battery in a neat way. You know that little clip on top of the 9-volt? I stripped it out, hand-soldered it to the connectors on my little TV Jammer circuit, and then I could plug another 9-volt battery in as my power source. So I was able to carry this 9-volt battery case with the TV Jammer on it totally concealed. Except for a little six-inch wire that acted as an antenna, which I had to hang out the side to transmit. I put it up my sleeve to hide it.
I went over to a friend’s to try it out on his TV—he had a little black-and-white TV in his dorm room—and sure enough, I was able to jam his TV black.
I walked into the main lounge of our dorm where everybody was watching a big black-and-white TV. I tuned the TV Jammer and, whack, it blacks out. Wow, I thought, that’s a funny joke.
I showed it one day to Randy Adair, my Christian friend, and he said, “You should try it on the color TV that’s in the basement of Libby Hall,” the girls’ dorm.
I walked in there and saw a lot of guys and girls. They were in there watching that TV all the time, it turned out. I walked in back where I was in the dark enough, and I turned the TV Jammer on, expecting it would kill the picture. All it did was fuzz it up, though.
Well, without any planning whatsoever, my friend Randy, sat in the front row of chairs, leaned over the TV, and whacked it really hard. I caught on quickly. I instantly made the TV picture go clear, which of course made everyone think that the whacking worked on the TV. I waited for a couple of minutes and jammed it again. It fuzzed up the picture again and Randy hit it again. And I made it go clear again. A couple of minutes later I jammed it
again, but this time I let Randy hit it three or four times before his whacking “worked.”
So anyone watching would think that, okay, hitting harder works better. They all thought something was loose inside the TV and that by hitting it hard with your hand you could fix it. It was almost like a psychology experiment—except, I noticed, humans learn better than rats. Only the rats learn it quicker.
Then, later that night, Randy didn’t get up to whack the TV. So someone else did. I was hoping that would happen! Someone else whacked it, and I made it so the TV worked. Ha! A whole audience of guinea pigs. I couldn’t have wished for more. Over a period of about two weeks, I went there every night to watch people whack the TV. When that didn’t work, they’d start to fine-tune it—in those days, TVs came with tuning controls—and I would quietly work the TV Jammer so that if they tuned it just right, the TV worked again.
After a while, I made it so that if someone touched the tuner and adjusted it to fix the picture, it would work. But then when they pulled their hand away, the screen would go bad again. Until they put their hand back on the tuning control, that is. I was like an entertainer. A puppeteer—with live puppets under my control.
Then the people got this superstition about how it mattered where your body was. I remember one time there were three people trying to fix the TV. By this time I would wait for some interesting thing they would do to fix the picture so I could trick them into thinking they had done it. One of the three guys had his hand in the middle of the TV screen. He was standing with one foot up on a chair. Seeing his hand accidentally rest in the middle of the TV screen, I took my cue and fixed the picture. One of the three guys announced, Hey, the picture’s good. They relaxed. When the guy in front pulled his hand back, I made the picture go bad again.
The guy in back of the TV turning the dials on the back of the
TV said, “Let’s all try to get our bodies where they were and maybe it will work again!”
A few seconds later, the guy in front rested his hand back on the middle of the screen and I did it again, fixed the picture. He tested it by pulling his hand away—I made the picture go bad— and then putting it back on the screen—and I made it go good again.
Then I noticed Mm take his foot off the chair and put it down on the floor. Again, I ruined the picture. When he put his foot back on the chair, he looked so startled when the picture went clear again. God, was I good to pull this off without ever getting caught.
He turned to the other students in the room and loudly announced, “Grounding effect.” He had to have been an engineering student to have known a word like that back then.
The dozen or so students stayed for the second half hour of Mission Impossible with the guy’s hand over the middle of the TV! And TVs were pretty small back then.
The only trouble is, I’d gone too far. For the next few weeks, virtually no one showed up in that TV room. They had had enough.
• o •
Later in the year, they all came back again. So again I would play with this game, and just have so much fun. Sometimes people would have to pound the TV as hard as they could on top. Other times, there had to be three people on the TV at once—
one pounding, one tuning, and one turning the color dial on the back that adjusted how much red, green, and blue the picture had. After that, they needed more than me to get the picture back! So a repairman had to be called.
After the repairman came, I heard someone at the TV mention that he’d said it was an antenna problem. I jammed the TV again, so what did they do? Of course, someone picked up the twin-lead
antenna wire and lifted it up over his head. I made the screen go good. He put it down and I made the screen go bad again. Up, good … down, bad. And after a while, I made it so he had to hold up the antenna higher and higher. This guy’s trying to watch the last five minutes of some show, and he’s stretched out to the ceiling, it was hilarious.
Except for Randy, I never told anyone else about it the whole year. I found it just amazing that at no time did anyone suspect that a human was toying with them. They never caught on! It was so funny. I couldn’t make up a story this good. The only time I regretted using the TV Jammer in the TV room was during a daytime watching of the Kentucky Derby. Of course, I timed it down, to the last stretch, and then I jammed the TV. Those kids erupted like animals, throwing chairs at the TV and everything. If it had been a human being, they would have beaten him to a pulp, they were that upset. And I felt horrible because I knew that if they had found me out on that day, it would’ve been hospital time.
There’s a point where a joke crosses to a point where it is beyond funny—not funny anymore but scary—and this was it.
• o •
I had a computer class at Colorado where I took the TV jamming concept a little further.
Just the fact that I was able to take a computer class was amazing. Back then, there were only a few colleges that had computer courses. Undergraduate computer classes were virtually unheard of, so this was a graduate class. Being enrolled in engineering at Colorado, even as a freshman, meant I could take any engineering class, even graduate classes, as long as I met the prerequisites. And luckily there weren’t any for this course. This class was just amazing—in it, they taught everything about computers, their architecture, their programming languages, their operating systems, everything. It was such a thorough course.
The only problem was, it was held in the engineering building,
where the classrooms were really small. So only a third of our class got to see the professor in person in one room. The other two-thirds had to watch on TV, on closed circuit, in a room that had four TV sets on the wall.
So I thought, Okay. What a great opportunity for the TV Jammer. But first I had to make an even smaller TV Jammer, a version that would be even harder to detect. So I built one inside of a Magic Marker, including the battery and everything. (I’d taken the pen apart and put in a AA battery. At the very end of the pen I put in this little thumbscrew for tuning.)
I took it to computer class one day. I went to my usual seat over to the left rear of the class, and I took my little TV Jammer pen, turned it on, and tried to jam the TVs. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to do this—I wasn’t sure if it was even possible to jam TVs where the antennas came in on a coax. After all, coaxial cable was unusual in those days. The normal thing was to have twin-feed antennas.
But, sure enough, all the TV sets jammed. The one real near me didn’t jam up that bad, but the other ones did. Well, almost instantly these three teaching assistants started looking at us. One of them said, uOkay. Whoever’s got the transmitter, turn it off.”
Wow. I didn’t even know there were TAs in the class. So while they’re looking right at us, saying “turn it off,” do you think I’m going to reach my hand down and turn it off in plain sight? No way.
My plan had been to just jam it for a few seconds, but now I couldn’t turn it off without getting caught.
So I’m sitting there kind of scared, afraid to move because they’re watching us so closely. I couldn’t even put my hand near it for fear that it might make the images onscreen wobble. I didn’t even want to reach over to my Magic Marker and click the Jammer off because the guy next to me would hear me click something. He’d know I did it.
Eventually the TAs sat down, but they kept watching us. There was nothing they could do. And you know, the TVs weren’t jammed so bad that we couldn’t watch the professor or take notes. So our class just went on, with all of us watching the jammed TVs.
So I’ve got my Magic Marker TV Jammer sitting there between the two rings of my binder when suddenly the guy who’s sitting the closest to the TV jammed the worst, in the right rear of the classroom, decides to gather his books and leave early. I decided to make the TVs waver as he was walking out. I felt like I could get away with it. I couldn’t resist.
As he was leaving, the picture back there on the right rear TV went perfect. One of the TAs pointed at him. The TA said, “There he goes.”
Pranks are entertainment, comedy. Not only did I manage to pull off this prank, but I managed to make it look as if someone else had done it. That’s a step beyond the old rule “Don’t get caught.” I learned how to use that technique many times throughout my prank career. And if you’re shocked that I can trick people with my pranks and not feel dishonest about it, remember that the basic form of entertainment is to make up stories. That’s comedy.
I don’t know if they ever did anything to that guy, but I doubt it. I hope not. It’s not like they could catch him with a TV Jam-mer. As far as I knew, I had the only one.
• o •
But I did end up getting in some trouble that year.
You see, I started writing programs that could kick paper out of the computer over at the computer printers everyone had to use at the Computer Center of the University of Colorado. That wasn’t a big deal. But then I thought, Okay, what are computers for? They’re for calculating numbers. Calculation has always been central to my association with computers, you know. So I tried to think up something really clever.
I wrote seven programs—they were all real simple but extremely interesting in a math sense. One of them dealt with what I called “magic computer numbers.” That would be the powers of two. So 21 equals 2, 22 is 4, 23 is 8, 24 is 16. These are the binary numbers all computers work with, so they are the most special of all the computer numbers.
I made it so the printer would print out the results formatted in a way that was readable. For instance, one line might say: 1,2. That meant 2 to the first power is 2. The next would say 2, 4: 2 to the second power is 4. You will see that the numbers get really big really fast. For example, 2 to the eighth power is 256; 2 to the sixteenth power is 65,536. So pretty soon I am filling up pages with these really long numbers! After enough pages, the powers of 2 would be almost a line long. Then they would expand to two or three lines. Eventually it got to where each number might be a whole page or more!
Another program worked with Fibonacci numbers. These are numbers that go in a sequence like 1,2, 3, 5, 8,13,21,34 … Each Fibonacci number is the sum of the two numbers preceding it. So it’s a never-ending sequence. All of my seven programs did this— calculated numbers in these long, ridiculously long, sequences.
Some programs have loops and don’t stop running because there is a bug, or a problem, with a program. That is called an infinite loop, which I told you about in connection with the chess game I did back in high school. Anyway, the Computer Center automatically kicked off any program that ran more than 64 seconds. So I figured out that all my computers could print out 60 pages in under 64 seconds, and that’s why I wrote each program to print out only 60 pages all numbered page 1, page 2, etc. The next time I ran the program, it would print the next 60 pages (beginning at 61), and so on. I wrote all my programs so they would punch some cards I could use the next time so the programs could pick up where they left off.
I would walk over to the Computer Center every morning and drop my seven programs off. Then, around noon, I would pick up my outputs and resubmit the programs. Then I would come back in the evening and resubmit them. I would get three runs a day times 6
0 pages times seven programs piling up in my dorm room. Mike, my roommate, started getting a little upset at all the space it was taking up. It was really piling up: reams and reams, feet and feet of computer paper, all stacking up in my dorm room.
Then, one afternoon, I got to the Computer Center for an afternoon run and they didn’t have my programs there. There was a note there saying I should see my professor right away.
I went to see him in his office. He said, “Okay, sit down.” He started a tape recorder—he punched a button and started recording us. I remember I got a bit scared.
“You’ve been running these programs on your own,” he said.
And I said, “Yes. We were in a programming class. I was learning programming. I ran them under my own student number. I didn’t try to hide the fact I was running them.”
“This had nothing to do with our class,” he said.
“It was FORTRAN,” I told him.
“This is not the FORTRAN we teach,” he said. And he was right. Because I had gone way into the manuals to find little
What Is FORTRAN?
FORTRAN is a computer language developed in the 1950s and still heavily used for scientific computing and numerical computation half a century later. The name comes from the words “Formula Translation.” As a compiled language, it is typically faster and more powerful than an interpreted language such as BASIC.
tricks of mathematical symbols. I had gone way beyond simple programming, and we both knew it.
He said it took him a long time studying my programs to figure out what they did, but he finally figured them out. He said: “Are you trying to get me?”
Get him? I didn’t know what he meant by that. I guess he felt threatened by the unrest happening in relation to the Vietnam War. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was big on that campus. But I was totally apolitical except for registering once to be in the University Republicans Club! I mean, I was just a mild, meek engineering student and would never be involved in anything politically subversive.
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