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By Root 689 0

of a man who spent his childhood in the impoverished badlands near the border of New Mexico and Texas. Despite these inauspicious origins, his brilliance and charisma were irrepressible, and he achieved a precocious success. In 1971 an illustration from his Ph.D. thesis on game theory was featured on the cover of Scientific American. Alvy became an associate professor at New York University, but he chafed at the dull conformity of academia. After a skiing accident in New England, he was forced to spend three months lying on his back in a full-body cast, which gave him time to meditate about his life. He saw himself as an artist and a “wild-ass hippie.” He was brilliant at math and computer theory, but he also enjoyed more iconoclastic pursuits like parapsychology and astrology. Being a respectable professor was “a yawn,” he thought. His intuition told him to drop out and go to the bohemias of California.

Alvy moved to Berkeley and spent a year hanging out as a hippie. When he finally ran out of money, he scrounged for cash by teaching a course at the university. He also agreed to write the introduction to a new edition of a book by the great computer science theorist John von Neumann.

The Berkeley library didn’t have some of the reference sources he needed, but the Stanford library did. It was only an hour’s drive, but it was a trip that changed his life.

After spending the day in Palo Alto, Alvy had dinner with the family of a computer scientist he knew there, Dick Shoup, and he stayed the night at their house. Dick worked at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the hills just beyond the Stanford campus.

In the morning, Dick said to Alvy: Come over and see what I’m doing.

Alvy was uninterested but he felt an obligation to his kind host, so he went.

Twelve hours later, he stumbled out of the PARC building.

He had experienced his own “holy shit” revelation.

My God, this is what I came to California to do! he thought, as if the hidden hand of destiny had finally explained why it had mysteriously attracted him to this place.

Dick had shown him a software program called SuperPaint and a powerful computer that was designed for storing images. With these two electronic tools, they simulated drawing and painting on the computer screen, creating lines, shapes, objects, patterns. And colors! Hardly anyone had seen colors coming out of a computer before.

Alvy was astonished, addicted. This was the perfect combination of his two great interests: art and computing. He had to find a way to hang around and play with this stuff.

There weren’t any job openings at PARC, so Dick and his colleagues hired Alvy with a purchase order, as if they were paying for an office lamp or a water cooler. “I didn’t care about titles or money,” Alvy recalls. “I just wanted to make art on their machine.”

For a while Alvy had the freedom to experiment and create. Sometimes he jammed on the machines along with one of his bearded hippie-artist friends, a motorcycle freak named David di Francesco. They wrote a grant application and submitted it to the National Endowment for the Arts. But before their grant could be approved, the bureaucrats at PARC canceled the purchase order and ended Alvy’s stay as a technological squatter.

The hippies were stranded. PARC was the only civilian institution that had the graphics computer they needed, a hugely expensive machine called a frame buffer. They needed to find another one. They heard that the University of Utah was buying one of these whiz-bang contraptions from a startup that had been founded by a couple of its professors.

To Utah!

Alvy and David were so charged up that they drove Alvy’s Ford Torino through the Sierra Nevada mountains in a treacherous snowstorm in their haste to get to Salt Lake City.

When they got there, the computer researchers said that they were too late. They had just missed the crazy rich guy from Long Island, who had come to town and quickly spent millions of dollars buying up every type of graphics computer that the professors’ company was trying to sell. The only other