Boxes. (No public-domain images available of software designers Bob and Carolyn Box.)

Before I put Hackers, Steven Levy’s 1984 book about the rise of renegade computer wizards, back on the shelf, I want to provide one more excerpt. This one is about married couple Bob and Carolyn Box, who decided to make software their livelihood after working as gold prospectors, among other things. They quickly taught themselves to be star hackers at Ken Williams’ gaming company, Sierra On-Line. Even by the eccentric standards of the time, these two had colorful backgrounds. An excerpt:

“Of all Ken’s new programmers, none exemplified his zeal for reforming lives by computer power as much as did Bob and Carolyn Box. Bob Box was in his fifties: they had lived in the area for well over a decade and worked at their ranch-style home five miles from Oakhurst, in the almost undetectable hamlet of Ahwahnee. Bob, who had dark hair, soulful eyes, and a nose of basset-hound proportions, was approximately four feet in height. He was a former New Yorker, a former engineer, a former race car driver, a former jockey, and a former Guinness Book of World Records champion in gold panning. Carolyn Box was slightly over five feet tall, had long brown hair and a world-weary attractiveness, and was the current Guinness Book of World Records champion in gold panning. They’d married twenty-six years ago, when Carolyn was fifteen. For the past few years, they’d been running a gold-prospecting supply business and searching for gold in the Fresno River, which ran in their backyard. The Oakhurst-Coarsegold area was on the southern rim of the California mother lode, and the gold the Boxes dredged up from the river one morning they came up with two thousand dollars’ worth in a half hour financed their programming courses at a Fresno trade school.

Man panning for gold in Alaska, 1916.

They had realized that the gold of the 1980s would be software, and their goal was to work at On-Line. Though Carolyn Box had been apprehensive about dealing with a computer, she instantly understood the required concept, as if computers were a language she’d always been talking. It was almost supernatural. She was the first one in the history of the school to get a 4.0 average in her courses. Bob did well, too: programming was like gold panning, he realized you proceeded in logical steps, and concentrated while you did it.

But when they presented themselves to Ken, he was skeptical. He told them that programmers usually peaked at nineteen and were over the hill at twenty; even Ken, at twenty-eight, was just about washed up. (Not that he believed it.) Ken wanted to give the Boxes a chance, though, because they fit right in with the dream he had about On-Line and the great computer future. So he told them to put up something on the screen using assembly language, in thirty days. The Boxes’ school had taught them programming in high-level languages on mainframe computers; they knew nothing about Apple assembly language. But working day and night, they came up with an 82-line program only five days later. It moved a dot around the screen. Ken asked them to try something else, and, again working almost every waking hour, the Boxes created a 282-line program with a little airplane moving around the high-resolution screen. Ken hired them, and set them to work programming a pet project of his, an educational game.

Soon the Boxes were hard at work getting a little dog, whom they named Dusty after their own dog, to walk across the screen. They would proudly explain to visitors that their hack used a sophisticated technique called exclusive-or-ing, which allowed for zero-flicker animation. They felt they’d given life to Dusty Dog. ‘This dog is like our pet,’ Carolyn Box would say. When Ken first saw Dusty Dog move across the screen, the little basset legs moving with steady, non-flickering fluidity, he almost burst. ‘It’s days like this that make you proud to be in this business,’ he told them. Even these middle-aged gold prospectors could be software superstars … and Ken was the Moses who led them to the promised Computer Land.”