The Eudaemonic Pie

by Thomas A Bass

  “The major problem had to do with filtering the signal to get it out. This wouldn’t have been difficult if it had been strong and solid, but we didn’t want that kind of signal, because the casinos could pick it up. We wanted to operate, as they say in the technical jargon, close to the noise. But any time you’re operating close to the noise, you’re in danger of falling into it.”

  In his redesign of the radio link, Kanter kept the basic concept of transmitting signals by means of magnetic induction. These were digitally generated and received, like the new stereo systems that flash computer script onto their LED quartz-lock tuners, but Kanter devised additional filters for cleaning the signal of unwanted noise. “These provided a quantum leap in accuracy,” he claimed, and for two weeks of work rebuilding the radio link, he was paid $600. This was Eudaemonic Enterprises’ first cash outlay for its new generation of equipment.

  After Kanter’s involvement, the Project went nowhere. He returned to the Silicon Valley, and no other hacker competent to the task of rebuilding the computer stepped forward. The Eudaemonic Pie again looked as if it were levitating skyward for lack of substance. With the Project stalled, Kanter’s new transmitters and receivers, along with the rest of the Eudaemonic computers and hardware, were thrown into cardboard boxes. These were stored in the basement of the Riverside house, where for the next eight months they would quietly gather mildew and rot.

  On a sunny afternoon in April 1980, Norman was strolling out of Mellis Market with several loaves of French bread under his arm when he ran into Mark Truitt, a former student of his. Truitt, at age thirty-two, was finishing the second of his two college careers, this one in physics, while the first had been in art and sociology. The brightest student in his class, he could have landed any number of jobs in the Silicon Valley. But he wanted nothing to do with military work and bomb making, and he realized that most physicists, either directly or indirectly, do just that. The very afternoon he bumped into Norman, Truitt had walked out of a job interview at Watkins-Johnson, an electronics firm halfway between Santa Cruz and San Jose, on learning that they wanted his talents for building radar jammers for bombers.

  “Working for the military is a job with no soul,” he said.

  “We have something you might like to do,” Norman told him. “Why don’t you come over to dinner and we’ll talk about it.”

  After dinner, Doyne, Norman, and Mark walked out of the house and down a flight of stairs to the basement. They unlocked the door to a small room with a cement floor and wooden shelves, and then opened a second door that led into the nether reaches of the cellar. Here, lying on a dirt floor, they found the cardboard boxes and suitcases in which the Project, unplayed now for a year and a half, had been stored.

  “After explaining the system to me and asking if I was interested in building the next generation of computers,” said Mark, “they thought I should look at the equipment. So we scrounged everything out of the basement and dragged it into the little room under the stairs. Out of these rotting boxes and suitcases they pulled a mess of antenna T-shirts, false-bottomed shoes, sacroiliac belts, battery packs, and computers. Everything stank of mildew. But we spread it out on the shelves and actually got one of the computers to do a little something.

  “They gave me a battery pack and a computer to take home and study. I also had a shoe with a switch in it. I put them in my dresser drawer and took them out every once in a while to look at them. But all I could think was how unfeasible it was to put the computer in a shoe. Every time I looked at it, I realized what a giant problem it would be to fit the batteries in there, not to mention the rest of the hardware. I drew a picture of a large shoe with the batteries and computer in it, and the batteries alone, with several left over, covered the entire surface of the shoe.

  “After making my diagram I stopped thinking about the Project. I just didn’t see any way to take it seriously. I’ve always been intrigued by Robin Hood schemes, so I sympathized with the Project. But I didn’t think it was the job for me.”

  Doyne had been invited to spend the summer and following year working on theories of chaos and turbulence at the University of Southern California’s aerospace engineering department. Before moving south to Los Angeles, he arranged to meet Mark and talk about the Project at Banana Joe’s, a student hangout at the university. Sitting in on the meeting was Jim Warner, the electronics technician attached to the UC Santa Cruz physics department. Warner knew about the Project and had already offered some advice on hardware problems. Doyne described to him the latest plan to put the computer into a shoe. Then Mark pulled out his diagram showing that not even the batteries could fit in that small a space, much less the computer, solenoids, and other circuitry.

  “My God,” said Warner, looking at the diagram. “What do you need so many batteries for?”

  Doyne explained how the computer ran steadily over the course of several hours. The EPROMs, RAMs, transmitters, receivers, and solenoids required two different kinds of current—twelve and five volts of power—which in turn required two different bundles of batteries to keep everything running for a night of play.

  “Why don’t you turn the computer off?” said Warner. “When it’s not making predictions, power it down. That would save you a lot of juice.”

  “We realized immediately that that was a good idea,” said Mark. “It proved to be much harder to implement than we imagined. But this was the first time the thought of working on the Project sparked my interest.”

  Over the next few weeks Mark drew another diagram showing the circuitry required for turning the computer on and off. The microprocessor would run with full power when setting parameters or making predictions. At other times it would “power down” into a quiescent state that drew virtually no voltage. This greatly reduced the number of batteries required, and when Mark had finished making his second sketch, it looked for the first time as if the Project could actually build a computer in a shoe.

  “Norman, Doyne, and I,” said Mark, “talked about my diagram for the on-off circuit, and we agreed it was the way to go. But to build this kind of circuit into a computer requires a lot of extra chips, because when the computer powers itself down, it has to remember where it came from and how to get back there. You could say the new design was substituting memory for power. So when we looked at the on-off circuit and saw the extra chips needed to control it, we thought, ‘My God, that pretty much fills the shoe right there.’”

  Mark said he’d work on the problem. Again he threw the components into his dresser drawer, taking them out every once in a while to think about how to fit a computer into a shoe. He graduated from college that spring with highest honors and started work the next day as the sole employee of Eudaemonic Enterprises. He swept out the little room in the basement and built a workbench. He threw away the antenna T-shirts and aired out the computers. Surrounded by two oscilloscopes borrowed from the physics department, the KIM computer and PROM burner, the roulette wheel, a shelf of technical manuals, and dozens of plastic ice cream buckets filled with EPROMs, RAMs, and other electronic parts, he established the latest in a series of Eudaemonic laboratories.

  Mark lived not far from the Riverside house, out the back gate and around the corner in a little bungalow that was once a vacation cottage. At odd hours of the day and night he could wander at will into the Shop, as he called it, to think about the three technical problems Doyne had given him to solve. Ingrid had been burned, and other people shocked, when the solenoids clamped open. At other times the circuit operating the solenoids had burned up completely. This was the first problem to fix. Then there was the on-off circuit to design, in which memory and logic chips would replace batteries. Mark’s third and final assignment was to think of how exactly to fit the new computer into a shoe.

  For such radical miniaturization, it was obvious that the Project’s old technology of chips mounted into sockets and strung together with wire-wrap would have to be replaced by printed circuit boards—wafers of copper-coat
ed plastic onto which silicon chips can be loaded directly without any intermediary sockets or wires. The actual construction of the PC boards would be subcontracted to a specialty house in the Valley. Doyne would handle any programming changes necessitated by the new design. But Mark would have to come up with at least a rough idea for the layout of the PC boards, as this was the only way he could gauge the final size of the new computer. For solving the solenoid problem, designing the on-off circuit, and making a mockup of a PC-mounted computer in a shoe, Mark would receive $2000—payable on presentation of the first working shoe—as well as minimum wage for all his hours spent laboring on the Project. It looked to him as if he faced three straightforward problems, and he expected to have them finished by the end of the summer. Little did he or anyone else suspect that Mark would still be struggling with the details of building a computer in a shoe at the end of the following summer!

  “Mark is all right brain,” Doyne said by way of explaining Truitt’s personality. Doyne was referring to the intuitive and associative powers, supposedly localized in the right hemisphere of the brain, that allowed Mark to freewheel his mind at liberty from one scientific insight to the next. But the fact that Mark was all right brain also entailed certain impediments. Missing, for instance, were those hemispheric sections specializing in language skills and the sequential processing of information. This meant that Mark’s ideas, as brilliant as they might be, were not accessible through conversations conducted in the English language.

  “Mark can describe something to me for hours on end,” said Doyne, “and I won’t have the slightest idea what he’s talking about. I don’t get the point until Norman comes along to translate for me. Mark’s mind works by means of a filamentary process in which a half dozen ideas are all pursued simultaneously.”

  As Mark himself put it, “I have stray energy all over the place.” His were the classic symptoms of hyperactivity. He was an intellectual speed freak, always on, whirling his mind from first principle to first principle with nothing assumed and everything doubted until proven otherwise. “I think the idea that light travels at a constant speed is merely a dogmatic assumption,” he told me. “I tried to demonstrate this to a couple of my professors, and none of them would listen to what I had to say. It was too heretical. Norman alone among all the teachers at the university was willing to entertain the thought that the speed of light isn’t constant. He was my teaching assistant in intermediate physics, and from that point on I visited him whenever I had other philosophical questions.”

  Doyne had also been Mark’s teaching assistant for a workshop in electronics, where he was responsible for giving the class lectures on computers. “When we got to studying microprocessors,” said Mark, “Doyne used his own experience with the Project as the basis for what he taught us. He actually brought one of the roulette computers to class one day, although I didn’t know at the time what it was for.

  “I’ll never forget Doyne’s first lecture on microprocessors. It was disorganized and gave me a headache and boggled everybody in the room, but I was intrigued. He was still talking half an hour after the class was supposed to have ended. We had a break for dinner and a lab that evening. Between Doyne’s lecture and going back to the lab, I’d recovered and figured it all out. I flashed on the fundamental ideas needed to understand computers, and I haven’t learned a whole lot new since then.”

  Of slender build, with brown eyes and a red beard, Truitt dresses, like the rest of the native population, in track shoes, blue jeans, T-shirt, and a digital watch worn prominently on the left wrist. But his springy walk and quick gestures are clearly those of someone metabolically notched higher than normal. There are moments in talking to him when you feel as if he might levitate off the floor in a burst of enthusiasm. He keeps interrupting and looping back on himself. Entire sentences are finished and dispensed with by the end of the first word. His elongated face, high cheek bones, bushy beard, and domed forehead give him the look of a young Dostoyevsky possessed alternately by visions of God and roulette.

  Like most of the other Projectors, Truitt was a range-roving westerner who came of age with Sputnik and the war in Vietnam. Born in Santa Barbara, California, in 1948, the second son of a chemistry professor, he suffered what for his generation was the usual familial agony of high-speed motorcycle crashes, political revolt, and other torments deep in the Oedipal zone. “As a kid I was so hyped I gave other people headaches,” he said. “If they’d invented Ritalin back then, they would have drugged me.”

  Growing up in a family of Christian fundamentalists, missionaries, and Quakers, Mark acquired their ethical concerns, purified them with existentialism, and decided as a logical consequence that revolution was the way to go. “I always took the most radical position. My family had a devil’s advocate in me. I read Camus and Sartre, got deeply into existentialism, and ended up agreeing with Camus that if there is a God I’m against him. By the time I finished high school I was alienated from everything around me.” Mark was also alienated from science and some of his own most formidable talents.

  Attending a high school religious conference, he had been impressed by a debate he witnessed between a Quaker and a research scientist. “I thought the scientist didn’t see the world around him. It seemed as if a scientific education involved you in too much detail, while it was more important to look at the larger picture. During my senior year I decided I didn’t want to be a scientist. I quit taking math classes and tried to drop everything else. I thought I’d be a philosopher or a writer or a politician.”

  In 1967 Mark began the first of his college careers at Occidental College, with additional semesters spent at Swarthmore and in Mexico. “You can think of the chronology like this. I was at Swarthmore after the president died of a heart attack when students occupied the administration building, and I was in Mexico during the Chicago Convention. I was a full-time radical by then, busy occupying buildings all over the place.” Nominally majoring in sociology, Mark was actually more interested in painting, sculpting, and writing short stories. After four years in college, he left without graduating. About to be drafted, he paid $500 to a Los Angeles law firm that specialized in keeping people out of the army. For added insurance, he made friends in Vancouver and other cities over the Canadian border.

  Given the entelechy of the sixties revolution, Truitt drifted from politics into pastoralism. Working as caretaker on a fifteen-acre avocado ranch, he tended trees and did carpentry. He made his trips to Vancouver and put a lot of miles on cars and motorcycles shooting at high speeds up and down the Coast, until one too many brushes with mortality convinced him that his number was next. When Mark’s best friend died in a car crash on Highway 5 at four in the morning as the two of them were driving from Berkeley to L.A., “it totally shook me up,” he said. “I gave away my car and stopped driving after that. I used to feel immortal climbing mountains and doing reckless things. I’d always managed to luck out and get it together. But that was by far the heaviest experience in my life.”

  Rescuing him from the slough of despond, Mark’s savior arrived in the form of a hometown Santa Barbara girl six years younger than he named Wendy Tanizaki. A Japanese American, Wendy possessed a luminous smile that shone out of a face animated with intelligence and some deeper kind of knowledge. Mark had dug a large organic garden. They planted corn together. When Wendy started college at UC Santa Barbara, Mark left his avocado ranch and followed her to the Coast, where he bluffed his way into a job restoring antiques. “Whatever work it was, I’d pretend to be an expert. But this wasn’t an ordinary job. It was highly skilled work, more in the nature of doing a project or making art.” Already a perfectionist, it was in Santa Barbara working as a furniture maker that Truitt polished his talents as an artist and craftsman—skills he would later apply to building computers into shoes.

  When Wendy transferred to UC Santa Cruz, Mark followed her north and started the second of his two college careers. He enrolled as a freshman, majoring this time in
environmental studies. “I was obsessed with solar energy,” he said. “Then Wendy left for two years to live as an exchange student in Italy. I was completely bummed out, and as solace I started studying physics again. That’s all I did day and night while she was gone.” He took enough courses to get degrees in both math and physics. Recruiters from the Silicon Valley started tugging on his sleeve, and he began to think that “electronics might make an accessible career.”

  After a summer job building radio amplifiers, Mark had been offered a full-time position at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. But he had turned them down to marry Wendy on her return from Italy and finish his senior year at Santa Cruz. Only then, about to graduate first in his class in physics, did he look around the Silicon Valley for work. “Knowing that I could always go back to making furniture, I decided to give science another try. It couldn’t hurt too much, and I might make some money.”

  On his initial sortie into the job market, Mark rode the bus from Santa Cruz to Watkins-Johnson—one of the electronics firms shoved, for lack of room, out of the Silicon Valley toward the coast. The Santa Cruz Mountains provide a natural barrier between the technologized interior and the once-placid shores of Monterey Bay, with their fog-shrouded redwood groves, grassy valleys, and fields of Brussels sprouts planted on bluffs overlooking the ocean. This was a Shangri-la favored by retired people of all ages, until the dominant culture made its first incursion into Santa Cruz by building a branch of the University of California. As the university came on line, producing new cadre for the job market, their commute inland got shorter every year as one high-tech division after another marched over the mountains to meet them on Highway 17. At last report, one of the Antonelli brothers had sold his begonia garden on the shores of the Pacific, and now the coast itself will fall to the advances of a chip factory.