The Eudaemonic Pie

by Thomas A Bass

  Traveling five miles inland to Watkins-Johnson, Mark met a classmate from Santa Cruz named Rob Lentz, who was waiting to be interviewed for the same job. They sat together through an orientation lecture, in which they learned that Watkins-Johnson wanted to hire them for a crash program building radar jammers for air force bombers. Disturbed by what he was hearing, Truitt left the interview. Lentz stayed, was offered the job, and took it.

  “I walked out,” said Mark, “because I knew if I had gone into the personal interview I would have attacked the guy. I had dropped science in high school because I thought the whole purpose of it was building weapons. I had finally overcome that idea, and the first job I apply for with my degree in physics, they want me to build radar jammers. I was shocked and disgusted. The electronics environment right now is incredibly militaristic. Let’s face it, the government’s going hog wild buying a lot of fancy electronic junk.”

  When Norman ran into him that afternoon in front of Mellis Market and invited him home to look at the Eudaemonic computer, it seemed to Mark that he had only two choices as a physicist. Work for the war department making bombs and bombers. Or work for Eudaemonic Enterprises beating roulette. The second, hands down, was for Truitt the more intriguing proposition.

  12

  Magic Shoes

  Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.

  Alan Turing

  It requires strange talents to build computers. Given knowledge in math, electronics, and design, one also needs sympathy to bring inert pieces of silicon to life. You have to talk the language of machines—which is no more articulate than a series of electronic grunts telegraphed through a central processing unit in megahertz, or millionths of a second. You have to get down on the level of binary digits and coerce them two at a time through a maze of decisions. But while down there talking machine language, you must also comprehend the higher levels of computer thought, which is not really thought, but transistorized bits of silicon strung into loops of logic that only in the density of iteration become thought.

  Once brought to life as thinking machines, computers, like children, have to be taught to pay attention. Computer programs are nothing more than attention-getting devices. The more complex the program, the longer the computer’s attention span. It requires still more effort to teach these machines manual dexterity. Computers can perform a wide array of tasks. They can spot-weld fenders, fire ignitions, dial wake-up calls, buzz solenoids. But to push them from thinking about these assignments into performing even the simplest of them requires that they pay attention during the interaction of thousands of logical steps.

  To build a computer from the ground up, program it to play roulette, teach it how to buzz solenoids, give it the ability to transmit radio signals, mount it into a shoe, and then walk out the door wearing the world’s first pedestrian model—this is a tall order. To fill it requires skills plucked from physics, mathematics, electronics, information theory, the fine arts, and shoemaking. Amazingly enough, Mark Truitt either possessed all these skills or was willing to bluff his way into acquiring them. With a history of rushing in where angels fear to tread, he was the perfect candidate for becoming the Leonardo da Vinci of computer design.

  For all his scientific proficiency, the primary delight Truitt took in the Project was aesthetic. A computer in a shoe represented for him perfection in technological minimalism. It was the mot juste in silicon. He would go beyond canvas and pigments to make art out of printed circuit boards and chips. He believed the medium of microprocessors would produce the message of the twentieth century. It was in silicon that he thought people should look for the contemporary idea of beauty. The patrons of the new art were the Intels and Hewlett-Packards of Sunnyvale, who commissioned artists by the thousands to sketch diagrams of thinking machines, voice-activated machines, self-repairing and self-replicating machines.

  Along with the temperament of an artist, Mark possessed what he called “natural rhythms,” and if these dictated working only at night, or throwing a computer in a drawer to stare at it sideways while putting on his socks in the morning, everyone soon accepted his methods, because they worked. People got used to hearing him at odd hours open the gate into the back yard of the Riverside house, cross the garden, unlock the basement shop, and give himself over to dreaming about silicon cities built into shoes. Like any other artist attacking a major commission, he began by making sketches. He drew dozens of wiring diagrams for the on-off circuit and solenoid buzzers, wherein lay the technical problems he had to solve before starting work on the computer itself.

  “I polished off the solenoid problem almost immediately, which was very encouraging. I discovered they were being driven off the computer by direct current. But the computer sometimes got lost in its program and went out of control, which in turn meant that the solenoid output went high. This drained all the current out of the batteries, melted the copper windings on the solenoids, blew out transistors, and burned the players. The solution was simple. I added a capacitor to the solenoid circuitry, which allowed only for pulses, rather than sustained drains of power off the computer.”

  Given his “filamentary method,” Mark worked simultaneously on designing the on-off circuitry required to “power down” the computer when it wasn’t setting parameters or making predictions. “I did the electronics troubleshooting early in the summer, and at the same time I worked out the idea for the on-off circuitry, not in wires, but the idea of it. I then got involved with the problem of fitting it all in a shoe, because I was worried that if I went ahead and built the circuitry, I still might not have enough room. It was at that point that I came up with the idea of a computer sandwich.”

  As far as Mark knew, no one had ever built a computer to be walked on. For a novel problem he came up with a unique solution. He would isolate the computer’s two basic functions, logic and memory, into separate units, invert one of them, and snuggle it down on top of the other. One unit would operate exclusively in the realm of bits, the binary digits with which computers orient silicon into memory. It would hold the microprocessor, EPROM, and RAMs needed for operating the roulette algorithm. The other unit would hold a clock, five logic chips, and the transistors and amplifier by means of which the computer talked to the outside world through toe clicks, radio signals, and solenoid buzzes. “I had looked at all the components laid out on a two-dimensional surface, and I thought there were too many of them to fit into a shoe. That’s when I hit on the idea of making two PC boards that would fit together like an Oreo cookie. There was going to be a tradeoff between thickness and overall size. But I was convinced the design would work.” Using little more than a hundred dollars in electronic parts, Mark would eventually succeed in building an ambulatory computer sandwich that when finished was roughly two inches wide, four inches long, and a half inch thick.

  “I pursued all these ideas in a scattered, or at least nonsequential, fashion. I was working on the design for the computer sandwich before I had even finished debugging the solenoids.” Concerned that Mark might get lost in his invisible city, Doyne came up from Los Angeles at the end of the summer. In a week of nonstop work, the two of them cleared up the solenoid problem, finalized the design for the on-off circuitry, rewrote the computer program with instructions for handling the new circuit, and sketched the first complete pictures of a computer in a shoe.

  “Toward the end of that first summer,” said Mark, “I was working like a dog. I was completely obsessed with it.” But a new problem had appeared that was sapping attention from his other filamentary concerns. Mark had retrieved Harry from among the old computers stored in the basement. He had dried the mildew out of it and set up the computer on a bench in the Shop. “I wanted to see it working perfectly before moving ahead to build the next generation of machines. But I discovered, when testing it, that Harry kept getting lost in its program. This was serious, because it resulted in the computer either giving out wrong signals or draining all the juice out of the batteries.” Pains
takingly checking every wire, socket, component, and chip for electrical continuity, Mark spent several weeks troubleshooting Harry’s hardware. “I finally got the error rate down from three to one percent, which meant that every time you told it to do something, the computer would screw up one out of a hundred times. This might happen no more than once an hour, but it was still intolerable—no way can you let a computer get away with that sort of thing.

  “I was incredibly frustrated. After everything I’d already put into the Project, I realized the computer still wasn’t reliable enough. In the middle of September I said, ‘To hell with this. I know I’m not supposed to mess with the program. But I’m suspicious, and I can’t stand it anymore.’ So I dragged the programming manual out of the basement and spent a week studying it. The manual by that time was a hundred and fifty pages long, and I went over it line by line. This was a last-ditch effort. I had tried everything electronic I could think of, and I was ready to give up.”

  At the end of the week Mark found the error. In the first line of a subroutine, a simple but necessary command had been omitted for telling the computer to pay attention. This was the kind of thing that only something as dumb as a machine would need to be told. Given the thousands of instructions that go into a computer program, the task of remembering what each of them means is simplified by gathering related instructions into electronic file folders that might be given names like “How to Drive Around the Mode Map” or “Roulette Wheels—Tilted.”

  “In programming,” said Mark, “it’s common to design subroutines made out of many separate modules. This saves space in the program. Instead of writing the same instructions ten times over if you want the computer to perform a certain task, you just zip around to the subroutine and back again to the program. I’m really into subroutines when I write programs. It saves a lot of effort when you have to perfect only one set of instructions for a particular assignment.

  “The Project’s roulette program is built out of subroutines. But there’s one important trick to using them. When the computer goes to a subroutine, it has to keep track of where it came from. Otherwise, when it finishes, it has no way of remembering how to get back to where it was. Subroutines can use other subroutines which use other subroutines, and after you’ve nested them a hundred deep, you can end up with a very complex arrangement.

  “Before branching into a subroutine, the computer is supposed to write the necessary information into its random-access memory. So the first line in the program should tell the computer: ‘Remember the subroutine address of where you’re going and where you came from.’ It took me a week of staring at it before I realized this one command wasn’t in the program. And because it wasn’t there, when you turned the computer on, it would sometimes wander off to a random address and get lost.”

  Before starting work on actually constructing the new computer, Mark in another series of sketches designed a radio link to operate between the computer sandwich and its mode switch, which would be worn by the data taker in his left shoe. This second radio link eliminated all the wires that previously had run up and down the legs. In the new design, the data taker would wear a mode switch and transmitter in his left shoe, and a mode receiver, computer sandwich, and transmitter in the right shoe. The left shoe transmitter communicated between the mode switch and the computer, while the right shoe transmitter signaled the computer’s predictions to another sandwich worn in the right shoe of the bettor.

  On finishing his latest series of sketches, Mark was finally convinced that it was possible to build computer sandwiches—complete with microswitches, solenoids, radio transmitters, receivers, and batteries—small enough to fit into three magic shoes. He completed troubleshooting the solenoids. He finalized the design for the on-off circuitry. He satisfied himself that the program was debugged. He drew a sample layout of the printed circuit boards required for building the computer sandwiches. And then, when these tasks were finished, he went on strike. He locked the door to the Shop and stopped coming through the back gate.

  “I quit working on the Project for a week. It was a crisis period.” The crisis arose from the existence of that permeable, never completely definable boundary that exists between hardware and software. Except for Doyne’s brief visit, Mark had been working alone throughout the summer as Eudaemonic Enterprises’ sole employee. He had patiently sleuthed from one problem to the next until, finally, he was forced by necessity to track a number of glitches into the computer program itself. Programming the new computer was supposed to be Doyne’s responsibility, while Mark was in charge of the design and construction of it: the hardware. This division of labor among computer builders is common but often impossible to maintain. Bugs scuttle from hardware to software through a barrier that for them is arbitrary and porous. While tracking them down, Mark himself had had to cross the line between hardware and software, and in doing so, a web of responsibility had settled over him for programming as well as designing and building the Project’s computer. Consequently, he wanted two things, and he refused to go back to work without them. He wanted recognition for his new responsibilities, and money.

  Late in October, with all the Projectors gathered in Santa Cruz for the annual Halloween party, Doyne, Norman, Letty, and Mark sat down to talk about how to get the Project back on track. “It had been such a frustrating time, and there had been so many difficulties,” said Mark, “that I seriously considered dropping it. This was my first meeting with Letty, and she and the others responded to my concerns in a reasonable manner. Basically, everyone acknowledged that I had gotten involved with a lot of stuff that Doyne or Norman was supposed to do, or that was thought to be finished but really wasn’t. So we spent a couple of days working out a new arrangement.”

  Part of this arrangement took the form of cash. The $2000 he had been promised was to be paid immediately. Mark’s hourly investment in the Project, computed at minimum wage, had already mounted well over that figure. Added to this cash advance was a deferred salary, calculated at $10 an hour, to be paid from the Eudaemonic Pie. But the Pie itself at this point underwent a transformation. It was given a “front end,” defined as the Project’s earliest winnings, out of which Mark was to receive half of his deferred salary. The other half, and everyone else’s share in the winnings, would come out of the old wedge-shaped, democratic Pie. For Doyne in particular, who had already accumulated a whopping thirty-five hundred hours working on the Project, the deal was hard to swallow. It compromised the basic principles of the Pie and valorized recent work over early work on the Project. But he had little choice about whether to accept the arrangement. Without a new generation of computers and another raid on the casinos, the Pie—with or without a front end—would never be served.

  Everyone involved realized that the Project had become more complex than any one of them could control. Doyne was still master of a program nested in subroutines a hundred deep, while the arcana of the Project’s transmitters and receivers remained in Norman’s ken. Letty stood behind them as financial backer, and now Mark was recognized as CEO in charge of producing the computer itself. For the sake of Eudaemonic solidarity, they shook hands on the new contract and Mark went back to work. The strike was over, and the week’s tension dissolved into Halloween revels.

  Like its predecessors, this Halloween party had a theme. It was political in nature, a nod to the fact that communes and collective households everywhere were disbanding into more traditional nuclear entities. Conservatism was on the rise. A cowboy was being transposed live on TV from Hollywood to the White House. Money and power were back in fashion. Buttressing the new order was old religion—an aggressive form of Christian fundamentalism prepared to wage war on sin, the definition of which included most of what passed for daily life in Santa Cruz, California. So in the spirit of carnival, which embraces the demonic and purges it through dance, the Riverside communitarians invited everyone to come dressed on Halloween as “your favorite form of religious repression.”

  Ri
verside Street was flooded that night with a more luscious evocation of sin than appears in even the most hellfire of Jerry Falwell’s sermons. At this black mass with a sense of humor, transvestite angels bebopped in the arms of red devils. The house itself had been transformed into various candle-lit shrines and grottoes. There were rooms devoted to mysticism, faith healing, the laying on of hands, and other rites both sacred and profane. One chamber held an Altar to Sex Roles made out of Burt Reynolds and Dinah Shore photographs, advertisements for bodily improvement, and the covers of Harlequin romances. In the dining room a cross had been constructed on which people could take turns being crucified.

  Lorna Lyons came dressed as Saint Agnes, the fourth-century virgin martyred at age thirteen after rejecting the advances of a suitor. She wore a white toga, a halo of cotton balls, and enough makeup “so that I looked dead. Saint Agnes was a beautiful woman with men always on the make for her. But she refused to put out,” said Lorna. “The first man who tried to take her by force was struck blind and dumb. She took pity on him and returned his sight. But everyone was so enraged by her power that they cut off her breasts. I’ve always liked the fact that her withering glance could destroy.”

  Wearing a Green Beret uniform, reflector sunglasses, combat boots, and a T-shirt saying, “God, Mother, and Country,” Jim Crutchfield attended as “a mercenary for Christ.” Norman appeared as an apple tree with a snake in it. Ingrid arrived as a punk rock Mary. Letty came as Mrs. Money, with dollar bills pasted all over her. Doyne emerged as Mr. Self, the apotheosis of the “me generation.” But late in the evening he was strapped to the cross in the dining room, where he underwent a symbolic crucifixion and resurrection. “I was converted into a non-me person,” he said. “I was healed and lifted out of the misery of me-ness, so that once again I could see other people around me.”