by Ann Hulbert
Cowboy gumption continued to thrive on the SMPY side, fired up by the view that the great math minds of the future lay in a rare few, singled out and steered onto their individualized paths right away. By 1977, Stanley had more than enough graduating radical accelerants at Hopkins to merit a story in Time magazine about his “mathematical wizards”—eight boys, three of them seventeen-year-olds, all of whom he was betting on for “original contributions.” (Colin Camerer, an innovative behavioral economist at Caltech, went on to become perhaps the best known.) More teens were in the pipeline: in the wake of Joe and Jonathan, Stanley had enrolled seventeen boys by 1974. And his talent search had caught on. “Hundreds of seventh-graders have been pouring in from a wider and wider area to take his tests,” Time reported.
As he had from the outset of the decade, Stanley sounded like a high-energy hybrid in touting his enterprise—part inventive upstart, part elitist technocrat. “We don’t have any particular program,” he told Time. “If you’re gifted and motivated, we’ll help you do anything that fits you.” On the one hand, the young wizards were in charge. “Our goal,” he declared elsewhere, is “to make them independent of us and independent of their parents as soon as feasible.” On the other hand, they were being efficiently scripted to maximize their “most productive years” of research—“a precious human-capital resource,” as colleagues later put it, to serve a high-tech era. Stanley was proudly hard-boiled about his emphasis, going so far as to say at one point, “We’re not a talent development group. We’re a talent utilization one.” A numbers guy to the core, Stanley had his stars’ stats by heart. He could recite their middle school feats on the math SAT, the grades they had skipped, their early college matriculation and graduation dates. He could list their stellar GPAs and advanced degrees. Later on he could report exactly how old, or rather young, they were when they received their professional laurels. He said he sometimes felt like the book of Guinness World Records.
Those different things—empathy, for example, and social and emotional issues generally—didn’t lend themselves to the litany. In fact, Stanley seemed to be counting on a certain impervious immaturity to speed his protégés along smoothly. “Scientists are stable introverts,” he said of his group in the Time article, as though his math recruits already belonged to the guild. “They are not highly impulsive and tend to act rationally.” Stanley went on to invoke empirical evidence that mathematically precocious boys are backward when it comes to peers, in particular girls. “This has been a great asset in the early-entrance program because it gives them more time to study.” (Stanley’s own experience didn’t exactly match up: parting from his girlfriend and his best friend when he skipped fourth grade, he once said, had left him “discomfited socially” for several years.) One of his seventeen-year-old Hopkins graduates, who had arrived on campus as a barely high school–age kid, indicated that calmly forging ahead did not come as naturally as Stanley suggested. “I try to appear as normal as possible,” he told the Time writer. “If you go around broadcasting that you’re a weirdo, then people look at you like you’re a weirdo.”
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The academically tractable profile that Stanley described would have surprised Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, not to mention their parents. One of Stanley’s own pioneers didn’t fit the mold either, not that Stanley took particular note. Pleased to report that Jonathan Edwards’s “ ‘maladjustment’ disappeared completely” upon his arrival at Hopkins, Stanley was soon busy tending to other recruits. And Jonathan himself, now fifteen, sounded like a gung-ho radical accelerant as he shared his plans with The Baltimore Sun after his sophomore year in 1972. He would plow straight on to a Ph.D. “Given that you have the raw ability, the secret, if there is any, is that you have to adapt,” he explained. “You have to get used to what’s expected of you.” Except that, as Jonathan was also well aware, conforming to adult plans was just what members of his baby boom generation were loudly announcing they did not have to do—and grown-ups had better get used to it.
In fact, not unlike Gates and Jobs, Jonathan had already had practice pushing back, and ahead, in a less-than-cooperative way. Long-haired teenagers who took to the streets in generational rebellion weren’t the only ones calling the shots. So were young oddball academic standouts, beneficiaries of a child-focused postwar parenting ethos of a newly solicitous sort. Steve got the message very early from his adoptive mother and father that “they were willing to defer to my needs.” They let him know he was special (as school testing confirmed), and if he was a troublemaker (his antics included setting off explosives in kids’ lockers), he needed greater stimulation, not punishment. If he needed to escape bullying, as he did when he skipped fifth grade, they would scrounge to buy a new house in a better school district. And if he bullied his parents—as he did, particularly about college plans when the time came—well, that was part of the bargain. The catalyst he really counted on was a close buddy more obsessed with computers than even he was, Steve Wozniak.
The Gateses’ experience was a more uptight, upscale variation on the theme. Bill (called Trey by his parents and friends) was the middle child in his close-knit and well-connected Seattle family. He was precocious and socially aloof and, by eleven, constantly battling his mother. She and his father resorted to counseling for all three of them. The therapist’s verdict after a year: Mary Gates would have to readjust because her son wasn’t going to. She and Bill Gates, Sr., backed off, and they dispatched their scrawny and not exactly endearing almost-teenager to Lakeside School—where he proceeded to do what he pleased, an extreme version of the sort of quirky student the staff prided itself on attracting in the 1960s. Among other things, he felt perfectly free to pay very little attention to what his mother cared a great deal about: where he would go to college and whether people looked at him like he was a weirdo. Finding a few equally offbeat friends who shared his tech fervor—Paul Allen in particular—proved crucial.
Jonathan was a lonelier outlier than either Jobs or Gates, and certainly than Joe, his fellow radical accelerant at Hopkins. The misfit spirit of Bobby Fischer’s family may come to mind, thanks not just to Stanley’s wary diagnosis of Evelyn Edwards as “very, very aggressive” but also to Jonathan’s own assessment of his family as “not socially well-adjusted.” Atheist New York intellectuals transplanted to a Bible-belt suburb of Baltimore, his parents didn’t mingle and showed little interest in getting their son or his younger sister involved in sports or neighborhood life. During a polarized era, their response as urban liberals stranded in a conservative setting was to focus more fiercely on not blending in.
Jonathan’s father, Lionel, was an electrical engineer of few words. As a reading specialist, Evelyn put her passion for learning into practice. She went to night school to learn logic, determined to tackle the Principia Mathematica. Their extraordinarily bright son was a sponge, immersed in math and science—and science fiction. As Jonathan later put it, he “drank the Kool-Aid” in a science- and genius-worshipping household. He welcomed the opportunities his parents found for him, while feeling marooned at school, despite stumbling into oases of engagement there. His fifth- and sixth-grade teachers let him work on solo projects, even teach classes. In junior high, he lucked into an attentive math teacher who arranged for him to take high school geometry. By the time he met Dr. Stanley, Jonathan had made his way through algebra, trigonometry, and calculus outside of regular school—taking courses at, among other places, Harford Community College, where his father taught.
Unlike Joe, who was cooperative and quiet, Jonathan had made a habit of blowing off schoolwork that bored him. “I know I could do very well in them if I wanted to,” he told The Baltimore Sun of the classes he had ignored, “but I didn’t want to.” Not that “goofing off and [becoming] a disciplinary problem” saved him from being shunned as the brainy boy. Venting anti–Vietnam War sentiments didn’t win him cool points with his peers either. At home, the response wasn’t to clamp down but to seek professional advi
ce. A consultation with a New York psychologist, recommended by Jonathan’s aunt, evidently didn’t leave his mother feeling they could just ride out the phase. No wonder she seized on Stanley’s experiment with Joe. Jonathan remembered his mother half-joking—years before Columbine, of course—that “if I hadn’t gone to college I would have blown up my school.” For her part, Evelyn was at her wits’ end.
She was surely relieved to hear her disaffected rebel speak like a grade-conscious adult-pleaser as he hit puberty and the halfway mark at Hopkins: “You really have to be great,” Jonathan the rising college junior declared, “not just make C’s but A’s.” At the same time, being his mother and a teacher, she was perhaps not altogether surprised that a more complicated story soon surfaced. Jonathan had started out as a fourteen-year-old commuting student whose avid interest excited professors. He felt he had been “let loose in wonderland,” he said in retrospect. Just how loose, though, got elided in the brisk account Stanley later offered, which had Jonathan zooming from an initial stellar GPA onward to path-breaking computer work in the banking field when he was barely in his twenties—proof, in this telling, that top-down academic channeling worked like a charm.
The truth was that Jonathan got mesmerized by computers along the way, pulled onto a track that led nowhere Stanley could fathom. Nor could Gates’s and Jobs’s parents and teachers—or, for that matter, the boys themselves. “People imagine that programming is logical, a process like fixing a clock,” Ellen Ullman, a rare woman pioneer among the baby boom coders, has written. “Nothing could be further from the truth. Programming is more like an illness, a fever, an obsession. It’s like those dreams in which you have an exam but you remember you haven’t attended the course. It’s like riding a train and never being able to get off”—even if other people are eager to pry you away from the machine and lure you back into human company. For Jonathan, the fact that nobody was tugging was a mixed blessing.
The irony was that having been hustled into college early, he was left more completely to his own devices than Jobs and Gates were out west. Gates described himself becoming “hard core” at roughly the same time—seeking out computer access “day and night”—to his parents’ alarm. As he began tenth grade in 1970, they managed to impose a nine-month hiatus, during which Bill “tried to be normal, the best I could,” though it didn’t last. Picking back up with his Lakeside programming cadre, he and his friends shifted focus, newly intent on “monetary benefits,” as one of them wrote in his journal, rather than merely “educational benefits.” Down the coast, Steve left total tech immersion to reclusive Steve Wozniak, several years older. Jobs branched out, discovering a niche in a hipper geek crowd among the high school seniors, drawn to books and drugs along with electronics; he also landed a girlfriend. But Jonathan hadn’t latched onto anyone, including Joe. For his part, Joe found wonky socializing at Hopkins (only newly coed) just about his speed—relieved not to have to deal with a crazier high school scene.
Jonathan, who had taken an introductory programming course his freshman year, instead began spending hours alone in the basement room where the electrical engineering department had a PDP-11, a later model of the computer that had launched Bill a few years earlier. In retrospect, he described encountering the manual and feeling that he barely needed a guide to begin exploring: “It was just obvious. It was as if I’d already read the book.” Living at home, Jonathan now set off for Hopkins at five in the morning during the summer of 1971. He wanted to squeeze in all the time he could at the teletype keyboard of what was called a minicomputer—which it was, compared to the huge mainframes that emerged in the 1950s. Soon he had persuaded the “double E” chairman to give him a key to the department library, where Jonathan often slept on a sofa rather than waste precious hours in travel.
In contrast to Gates’s parents, the Edwardses did the opposite of trying to curb their son’s monomania. When Jonathan, not yet fifteen, asked if he could live alone on campus as a sophomore, they agreed. Looking back decades later, a father of three himself, he was stunned that his parents—and his professor—approved the plan. Where did he eat? How did he cope? What, if any, advice did he get from Stanley? He couldn’t remember. (Regina Fischer, having left Bobby at sixteen by himself in the family apartment, couldn’t quite believe she had taken such a step either.) The hours with the PDP-11 expanded, his solitude unbroken by the Go and chess games the Coke-drinking Lakeside diehards enjoyed together while programs were running. Jonathan recalled collaborating with assorted graduate students on a space war game at one point, but he was still a skinny kid lacking in social confidence, who felt he had little in common with older students on campus. (In his memory, Joe was in a different league, too, with a girlfriend—though Joe hadn’t in fact yet dared to date.)
Programming, as Jonathan reflected with the hindsight of middle age, didn’t so much supplant other relationships as provide a desperately needed substitute. “An act of taking dictation from your own mind” is how Ullman has summed up the process of navigating “between the chaos of human life and the line-by-line world of computer language.” Jonathan emphasized the allure of getting out of his head, exploring ways to share what lay within it. This “romantic view,” he acknowledged, might seem a jarring perspective to apply to a hypercerebral teenager who felt inept at making emotional connections. But it was the struggle to communicate, he had gradually come to understand, that helped drive his curiosity and creativity in a “new medium of expression, never seen before.” Software in the early 1970s, before anyone had much “idea how it work[ed], what its parameters” were, presented itself not just as a new science. It was an artistic frontier—a “blank canvas,” an “intellectual sculpture” to be discovered. Stanley’s formula of well-timed adult guidance in the acquisition of mathematical reasoning skills, and degrees to go with them, missed the essence of the experience. For Jonathan, personal turmoil—both intellectual and emotional—turned out to be crucial, and anything but simple.
Jonathan evoked a state of enthralled absorption, with the machine itself in the role of mentor, one without office hours or a kindly manner. The computer wasn’t a solicitous intermediary. It was a strict interlocutor and ally—and before long, if things went well, the computer was at the programmer’s beck and call. “You’re like a god in your own private universe, abstract world,” Jonathan said, conveying the heady power that can be obscured in what looks like mere dry code. “It works, or it doesn’t—more often doesn’t, because you make mistakes.” Debugging and doggedly proceeding, on “a machine that can do things,” made for a process at once unforgiving and rewarding. “Turn a kid loose in this new universe where they can create things—it’s intoxicating like writing novels,” he said, “only they’re dead but this can make things happen.” He emphasized the intense pleasure in it, “especially if you don’t find pleasure elsewhere.” Start when you’re young and flexible enough, and the pursuit readily becomes a compulsion.
JONATHAN EDWARDS Credit 11
“As in art, you have an inner voice that tells you how to sculpt this giant thing. You get a picture of a complex thing and you create it—and it talks back to you,” Jonathan said of a creative process that was rule bound but not self-enclosed. “It’s almost a personal relationship. You can get lost in it,” he explained, describing the allure of work that supplied a reciprocity he struggled with in life. “It’s a non-human world good for someone who hasn’t focused on sending emotional signals back and forth, but logical ones. The best programmers are not engineers but would-be artists.” They are also, he emphasized, would-be lovers and intimate friends, daunted by the challenge of expressing those desires. “You don’t find friendly, socially extroverted people good at it,” Edwards had concluded. Why burrow into the formidable complexities of nonsocial circuitry if warm-blooded bonding comes easily to you? The real programming standouts, he insisted, have been driven to their mastery by social hurdles they feel they can’t handle.
In his junior ye
ar, hormones kicked in as he turned sixteen, and Jonathan’s wonderland became a darker, disorienting place. The bowl haircut in his Baltimore Sun photo was gone. He made the move to the long-hair-and-wire-rims look and gave dating a try. But he was small and still younger than his Hopkins classmates, and hopelessly ill at ease. What Jonathan could blur by being belligerent in middle school, he now had to face head-on: he was, he felt, a social failure. By high school, Gates the pipsqueak know-it-all had allies and enjoyed a guru aura. With Paul Allen, he began parlaying computer skills into business opportunities. Jobs, the erstwhile loner, now had his cool countercultural crowd, as well as his partner in tech adventures, Steve Wozniak, holed up with electronics journals.
Holed up himself, Jonathan was unhappily isolated—and restless. The year before, “interested in logic and big ideas,” he had added philosophy as a second major and begun hanging out with a graduate student in the department. Through him, Jonathan gravitated to a “circle of potheads,” his phrase, and got caught up in the scene that Jobs had discovered before setting off for college. “The whole sex, drugs, and rock and roll thing messed me up for a long time,” Jonathan said—a derailment, in his eyes, where Jobs saw enlightenment. For Steve, the “fusion of flower power and processor power,” as Jobs’s biographer put it, primed him for an open-ended route as high school wound down. A hipper rebel than Bill (who duly applied to Harvard), Steve let his parents know he considered Stanford too staid: “The kids who went to Stanford, they already knew what they wanted to do. They weren’t really artistic.” Questers applied to Reed College, and when Steve headed there in 1972, the mantra on the back cover of the Whole Earth Catalog he brought along summed up his ethos: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”