The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [107]
And on the far side of the dead dot-coms, the dead pipes, there was Wi-Fi. If the Internet was the child of Cold War nuclear warfare, then Wi-Fi was the child of the Special Forces. Wi-Fi was all about little military-spec spread-spectrum radios. Secret radios. Tiny radios. The very kind of thing that Delta Force liked to carry way behind the lines of enemies (and allies).
Wi-Fi was just getting started, and when Van thought about it, it filled him with chills. Wi-Fi carried data that was fast, cheap, anonymous, wide-open, wireless, portable, great big bleeding menaces to data protection, to intellectual property, to information security, sold in shrink-wrap packs as if they were bubble gum . . . Wi-Fi was a nightmare. The stuff coming down the pike was worse. It was like it was evolving on purpose to make a secure life impossible.
Van shifted Ted from his right hip to his left. Someone tapped Van’s shoulder.
It was Tony.
“Van,” he said, “want to introduce you.”
An older man. White mustache. Glasses. Balding. Blue shirt, brown slacks. A conference ID on his lanyard.
“Jim Cobb.”
“Dr. Cobb!” said Van, almost dropping his son in astonishment.
There was no such thing as a Nobel Prize for computer science. James Cobb had won a Nobel Prize anyway. He’d had to share it with a Swedish physicist. Everybody knew that when it came to Swedes the Nobel committee had a soft spot the size of Stockholm.
“The Bell Labs Concurrent C superset,” Van gushed.
Cobb smiled. “That’s funny. Nobody talks about that much, these days.”
“I wrote my thesis on that.”
“The press always wants to talk about the photonics,” said Cobb. That was what he had won his Nobel for—he and the Swede, who was his electrical engineer. “You never get the time of day for the work that you loved best.”
“That superset paper in ’79, that was the best,” Van said, knowing that it was true.
“You know the best way to have truly great ideas?”
“How?” Van blurted eagerly. He was talking to a true-blue genius who had had at least seven genuine, world-class great ideas. A phenomenon.
“Have a hundred, and throw away ninety-eight of ’em! Haw haw haw!”
Cobb was laughing, but Van sensed in his gut that Cobb had never gotten over the anguish of it. Cobb had loved those ninety-eight lousy ideas with just the same passion as the two, or five, or seven, that had saddled him with his immortal fame.
“That way you handled synchronization conditions in Grendel,” said Cobb.
“Yeah!”
“Where the capsule structure supports inheritance.”
“Exactly!”
“I liked that,” said Cobb. “That was cleverly handled.”
Van wanted to sit on the floor. James J. Cobb had praised him. James Cobb, who knew the behavior of semiconductors down to the atomic level. A top-notch theorist with “his head right down in the bits.” A true grand master from computing’s heroic age.
In Bell Labs, guys like Cobb didn’t even bother with the borders between disciplines. They were the wizards of the coolest, tallest ivory tower around. Guys who did physics at breakfast, electrical engineering at lunch, and programming after dinner. Bell Labs had originated the transistor, plus UNIX, C, and C++, and the Karmakar algorithm. The little R&D crowd at Mondiale could only dream of the colossal achievements at Bell Labs.
“Cute kid,” Cobb told him. “Where’s Mom?”
“Oh, Mom’s resting awhile,” Van said. “This is Ted.”
“What, so you’re feeding the baby, changing the diapers? You younger guys are something else.” Cobb lifted a cocktail glass to his lips. Van hadn’t noticed any hard liquor at the party. Everyone else was carrying wineglasses. Apparently when you were a Nobel Prize winner at Erlette House, it wasn’t hard to find vermouth and olives.
“What’s your latest project, Dr. Cobb?” said Van.
“A year ago,” said Cobb, “February 2001, they shut down Bell Labs in Silicon Valley. First time that Bell Labs ever closed a facility.”
“Right, I heard that.” Bell Labs was Lucent now. And Lucent was very broke.
“Real focused on short-term research payoffs. I was working on HDTV. Not