Pictures made of holes
I was eight years old when my father put me in front of a key punch machine and began, quite without meaning to, the process of ruining me for ordinary employment.
This is not to say that I was some tragic indoor child who stared mournfully at baseballs through a window while other boys enjoyed sunlight. I liked baseball. I liked sports. I liked the usual boyhood business of grass stains, sore knees, and pretending not to hear when called in for dinner.
But I also knew, earlier than most, what I wanted to do.
My father was a computer programmer, and to me he occupied that rare paternal office somewhere between hero, magician, and man who knew where the good screwdrivers were kept. He took me into the world where he worked: the chilled, humming atmosphere of mainframe data centers, raised floors, blinking lights, green bar paper, and machines that looked as if they had been designed by engineers who believed furniture should frighten civilians.
He did not merely wave at the machines from a safe distance. He sat me down at a key punch machine and showed me what it would take to make a computer print a picture. You punched the cards. The cards told the machine what to do. The machine, with the solemn patience of an elephant doing arithmetic, produced the image on green bar paper.
Those were my first programs.
Other boys may have drawn rocket ships with crayons. I made pictures with holes in cards and a printer that sounded like it was building a house.
Naturally, I was hooked.
Two currents
Somewhere in the same childhood, my father gave me another infection, equally permanent and only slightly less expensive: trout fishing. He taught me to fish when I was young, and I became enamored with trout in that complete, helpless way children have when the world reveals one of its private wonders.
One day, while visiting him at his apartment in San Francisco, he opened the freezer and pulled out a long, fish-shaped object wrapped in foil.
To a child, few sentences are more thrilling than “Come look at this thing I have in the freezer.”
He unwrapped it and told me it was a steelhead.
A steelhead, he explained, is a kind of rainbow trout that goes off into bigger water, grows up, gets mysterious, and returns with the air of a fish that has seen the world and is not terribly impressed by you.
That was it. I wanted nothing more than to catch one.
So there were two currents running through my life from the beginning. One was made of logic, systems, punched cards, and machines. The other was made of rivers, trout, and the silver possibility of steelhead. Both came from my father. Both stayed.
A paper website, with ambition
Years later, I found myself working in technology at a moment when another current was beginning to move.
The internet existed, but it was not yet the thing everybody now carries in a pocket and consults before choosing a sandwich. It belonged mainly to universities, government agencies, military networks, and contractors. Dot-edu, dot-gov, dot-mil: respectable neighborhoods, all of them. Dot-com had not yet arrived in full carnival costume, knocking over furniture and changing the economy.
I had worked around people using DARPA-net, or the internet as it was becoming, and TCP/IP was familiar territory. I had dabbled with Mosaic. Then Netscape appeared, and suddenly the web began to look less like a research instrument and more like a doorway.
At the time, I was working for a catalog company.
A catalog, for younger readers, was a paper website that arrived by mail, usually thick enough to injure a coffee table.
The thought seemed obvious to me: why not put the catalog online?
This was before e-commerce had acquired its name badge. Amazon was still, essentially, a bookstore with ambition. The notion of an online catalog was not yet normal. It was barely respectable.
There was no web server room. We were still in the mainframe data center world, with some servers around the edges, like junior clerks hoping to be invited into the meeting. If there was going to be a web server, it had to be conjured into existence.
So I fired one up.
I showed how our catalog could be published on a web page. Not as a parlor trick, not as a toy, but as the beginning of a new way for customers to browse, search, discover, and eventually buy.
“Turn it off.”
The response from the wise men of the age was swift.
“Turn it off.”
This, I have learned, is the official anthem of the person standing directly in front of the future.
Turn it off. Don’t show it to anyone. The internet is a fad.
At the time, the opposition had many respectable costumes. IBM had its own ideas. Microsoft had not yet made TCP/IP native in Windows. Windows itself was still in that endearing phase where one used it with the same guarded optimism one brings to a folding chair at a wedding.
There were reasons, of course. There are always reasons. Committees manufacture reasons the way bakeries manufacture rolls.
Later, that first catalog company was quoted as taking a “wait and see” attitude toward the internet.
This is one of those phrases that sounds intelligent if said in a conference room.
“Wait and see.”
It suggests prudence. Wisdom. Steady hands on the wheel.
Unfortunately, when the road is turning and you are not, “wait and see” can become a very elegant way of driving into a ditch.
“I’ll show you.”
Eventually I left and went to another catalog company. I asked if I could start a website.
They said, “What’s a website?”
This was refreshing. Ignorance, honestly stated, is infinitely superior to certainty, foolishly declared.
“I’ll show you,” I said.
A few of us were already dabbling with HTML and browsers. We built the thing from scratch. I bought the hardware. We wrote the code. We integrated it with the back-end systems. We learned what we needed by doing what needed to be done.
Out of that came MusiciansFriend.com.
It grew into the largest online seller of musical instruments in the world. Later, it became part of the largest musical instrument retailer in the world.
Meanwhile, the earlier company, the one with the “wait and see” attitude, did wait. And it did see. It saw the internet become real, saw others move, saw the market change, and eventually saw bankruptcy from closer range than is generally recommended.
This is not gloating. Well, perhaps a teaspoon. But mostly it is a lesson.
History rarely announces itself by trumpet. More often, it shows up as something crude, half-built, badly understood, and easy to mock.
A familiar chorus
Which brings us to AI.
Here I am now, on the verge of retirement, watching artificial intelligence do the very thing we once dreamed of and could not quite reach.
We talked about AI in the eighties. We used Prolog and Lisp. We tried to build inference engines and expert systems and natural-language tools. We had the ambition. We had some of the ideas. What we did not have was the scale, the hardware, or what today are essentially AI factories.
Now the machinery has caught up.
And this time, the machine is not merely storing records or moving data from one form to another. It is generating value. It can draft, reason, design, explain, compare, summarize, prototype, and help a builder move at a speed that would once have sounded indecent at a planning meeting.
Naturally, the old chorus has returned.
“Oh, it’s AI.”
“So you didn’t do any work.”
“AI is fake.”
“It’s just a fad.”
“It’s dangerous.”
“It will never matter.”
The same fellow who once scoffed at the internet has found a new blazer and opened a fresh account online.
The funny thing about naysayers is that they often think they are defending standards, when what they are really defending is the comfort of not having to learn anything by Tuesday.
And yes, there is fear. There is uncertainty. There is doubt. There always is. The press understands this, and fear makes excellent bait. People will glue themselves to any screen that promises doom in a sufficiently confident tone.
But while the doubters are doubting, builders are building.
That is the difference.
The builder does not have to believe every claim. The builder does not have to worship every new tool. The builder simply asks, “What can this do? What can I make with it? What becomes possible now that was not possible before?”
Back to steelhead
That question has carried me from punched cards to online catalogs to AI-assisted software. And now, wonderfully, it has carried me back to steelhead.
Today I am building SteelheadAlmanac.com, a project that lets both old currents run together: my love of steelhead and my love of software architecture. It is part hobby, part craft, part memory, and part experiment in what a single builder can do with the tools now available.
My father would have loved that.
He would have loved the fish. He would have loved the machinery. He would have loved the fact that the boy he sat at a key punch machine is still making pictures with computers, only now the picture is larger, stranger, and connected to rivers.
The article in the briefcase
There is one more thing about my father.
He carried a copy of Cadillac’s famous 1915 advertisement, “The Penalty of Leadership,” in his briefcase. Permanently. The piece argued that the leader is attacked precisely because he leads. The criticism, the envy, the scoffing, the resistance: these are not proof that leadership has failed. They are often proof that leadership has arrived.
I still have that article.
And when I think about what I would tell young people today, I think of my father’s briefcase, the key punch machine, the steelhead in foil, the catalog they told me to turn off, and the AI tools people are now so eager to dismiss.
Do you want to be the person who waits and sees?
Or do you want to be the builder?
If you are early, people may laugh. If you are useful, they may resent it. If you are leading, someone will explain, with great confidence and a poor track record, why the thing you are building cannot possibly matter.
Build anyway.
Be curious. Be practical. Be amused when possible. Keep your standards high. Keep your hands on the tools. Learn the new thing before the old room has finished voting against it.
And if someone tells you to turn it off, be polite.
Then remember where the switch is.