Driving northeast out of Fresno on Route 41 toward the South Gate of Yosemite, you climbed slowly at first, through low fields dotted with huge, pitted boulders. About forty miles out was the town of Coarsegold; soon after, the road rose steeply, topping a mountain called Deadwood. Only after beginning the descent from Deadwood did one see how Route 41 formed the center strip of Oakhurst. Population under six thousand. A modern poly-mart named Raley’s (everything from health foods to electric blankets). A few fast-food joints, several clusters of specialty stores, two motels, and a real-estate office with a faded brown fiberglass statue of a bear outside it. After a mile or so of Oakhurst, the road continued its climb to Yosemite, thirty miles away.

The bear could talk. Push a button on its base, and you got a low, growling welcome to Oakhurst, a pitch on the price of land. The bear did not mention the transformation of the town by the personal computer. Oakhurst had seen hard times, but in 1982 it boasted one major success story. A company built, in a sense, by the hacker dream, and made possible only by the wizardry of Steve Wozniak and his Apple Computer. A company that symbolized how the products of hacking—computer programs which are works of art—had been recognized as such in significant sectors of the real world. The hackers who played Spacewar at MIT did not envision it, but the offspring of that PDP-1 program, now that the hardware hackers had liberated the computer and made it personal, had spawned a new industry.

Not far from Talking Bear was an inconspicuous two-story building constructed for offices and shops. Except for a small beauty parlor, a lawyer’s office, and the tiny local office of Pacific Gas and Electric, the entire building was occupied by the Sierra On-Line company. Its main product was code, lines of assembly-language computer code written on floppy disks which, when inserted into personal computers like the Apple, magically turned into fantastic games. A specialty of the company was “Adventure” games, like that perfected by Don Woods at the Stanford AI lab; this company had figured out how to add pictures to the game. It sold tens of thousands of these disks.

As of this August day in 1982, On-Line had around seventy employees. Things changed so quickly that on any given day it was difficult to give an exact figure, but this was over triple the employees it had a year ago. A year before that, there were only the two founders, Ken and Roberta Williams, who were, respectively, twenty-five and twenty-six when they started the company in 1980.

Ken Williams was sitting in his office. Outside was his red Porsche 928. It was another day to make some history and have some fun. Ken’s office today was relatively neat; the piles of papers on the desk were only several inches high, the sofa and chairs facing the desk were clear of floppy disks and magazines. On the wall was a lithograph, homage to Rodin’s Thinker: instead of that noble human frozen in cerebration was a depiction of a robot contemplating a rainbow-colored Apple.

Ken Williams, meanwhile, was characteristically sloppy. He was a burly, big-gutted man, with swollen features that overwhelmed his friendly blue eyes. There was a hole in his red T-shirt and a hole in his jeans. His shoulder-length, dark-blond hair covered his head in an uncombed matting. He sat draped over his tall, brown executive armchair like some post-counterculture King Cole. In a pleasant California cadence punctuated by self-effacing comments that wistfully tripped off his tongue, he was explaining his life to a reporter. He had covered the tremendous growth of his company, his pleasure in spreading the gospel of computers to the world through the software his company sold, and now was discussing the changes that had come when the company became big, something much more than an operation of hackers in the hills. He was in touch with real world power now.

“The things I do on a daily basis blow my mind,” he said.

He talked about eventually going public. In 1982, a lot of people who owned companies spawned by the revolution that the hardware hackers had started were talking about this. Computers had become the jewel of the economy, the only area of real growth in a recessionary period. More and more people were seeing the magic first glimpsed in batch-processed monasteries by the hands-on visionaries; in the power harnessed by the PDP-1 artists; in the accessible mastery of information provided by Ed Roberts and proselytized by Lee Felsenstein. As a result, companies like Sierra On-Line, started on shoestrings, were now big enough to contemplate public share offerings. Ken Williams’ talk was reminiscent of that heard several years before, when, using the same self-consciously nonchalant cadences, people would speak of one day getting rolfed: in both circumstances, an act once approached with evangelistic gravity was now regarded as somewhat of a delicious inevitability. Going public was something you naturally considered, at least when you had gone from being an ambitious computer programmer to an owner of a $10-million-a-year computer game company in a little over two years.

It was a crucial time for Ken Williams’ company. It was also a crucial time for the computer games industry, a crucial time for the computer industry as a whole, and a crucial time for America. The elements had conspired to put Ken Williams, a self-described former hacker, into the driver’s seat of more than a Porsche 928.

Ken Williams left his office and went to a large room two doors down in the same building. There were two rows of cubicles in this plaster-walled, industrially carpeted room. In each cubicle were a small computer and a monitor. This was the programming office, and this was where a young hacker had come to show his game off to Ken Williams. The hacker was a cocky-looking kid; he was short, had a smile of bravado on a pug-nosed face, and his chest jutted out, bantam-like, under a faded blue T-shirt. He had driven up from L.A. this morning, so high that he could have filled up the tank with his excess adrenaline.

On the monitor was a prototype of a game called Wall Wars, written in the past few months in intense bursts between midnight and eight in the morning. While the hacker had worked in a small apartment, his stereo had blared out music by Haircut 100. Wall Wars involved a stream of colorful, brick-like pieces forming a kinetic wall in the middle of the screen. On the top and the bottom of the screen were equally dazzling robot-like creatures. A player would control one of the robots, shoot through the wall by knocking out enough bricks to form a moving gap, and destroy the other robot, who of course would be trying to accomplish the same task, with the player as the victim.

The hacker had promised himself that if Ken Williams bought his game concept, he’d quit his job as a programmer for Mattel and go independent, joining the ranks of an elite group who were already being referred to as Software Superstars. They were the apogee of a Third Generation of hackers who had learned their programming artistry on small computers, who had never bootstrapped themselves up by way of a community. Who dreamed not only of the ultimate hack, but of fame, and big royalty checks.

Ken Williams ambled into the room and leaned an elbow on the edge of the cubicle. The young hacker, masking his nervousness, began to explain something about the game, but Ken didn’t seem to be listening.

“This is all so far?” Ken said.

The hacker nodded and started to explain how the game would eventually play. Ken interrupted him.

“How long will it take you to finish?”

“I’m going to quit my job,” said the hacker. “I can do it in a month.”

“We’ll figure two months,” said Ken. “Programmers always lie.” He spun around and started walking away. “Drop into my office and we’ll have you sign a contract.”

It was reminiscent of an old-time entertainment mogul giving the nod to an auditioning starlet. It was indicative of the massive change in the way people thought of computers, used computers, and interacted with computers. The story of the MIT hackers and the Homebrew Club had led to this: Sierra On-Line and aspiring software stars.

The Hacker Ethic had met the marketplace.

Ken Williams was never a pure hacker. He certainly did not take the appellation as a badge of pride; the idea of an aristocracy of computer excellence never occurred to him. He’d stumbled into computing. Only incidentally did he develop a relationship with the machine, and it was not until he thought himself its master that he even began to appreciate what kinds of changes the computer could make in the world.

At first, the computer had him totally stymied. It was at California Polytechnic, Pomona Campus, which Ken Williams was attending because (a) it cost only twenty-four dollars a quarter plus books and (b) he was only sixteen, and it was close to home. His major was physics; he had trouble with classes. Though Ken had always slid by academically on high aptitude, things like trigonometry and calculus weren’t as easily mastered as the subjects in high school were. Now there was this computer course, geared to programming in FORTRAN.

Ken Williams was intimidated by computers, and that intimidation triggered an odd reaction in him. He had always resisted preset curricula—while refusing to do his homework in junior high, he would almost compulsively read, everything from the Hardy Boys to what became his favorite genre, the rags-to-riches stories of Harold Robbins. He identified with the underdog. Williams’ father was a television repairman for Sears, a rugged man who had moved to California from Cumberland County, Kentucky; his coworkers nicknamed him “Country.” Ken grew up in a fairly tough neighborhood in Pomona, at times sharing a bedroom with his two brothers. He avoided fights assiduously, later cheerfully admitting he was “a coward.” “I wouldn’t hit back” he once explained, as if the rites of dominance and macho posturing were alien to him.

But when he read about those struggles in big, melodramatic novels, he was enraptured. He loved the idea of some poor kid making a bundle and getting all the girls. He was susceptible to the hyperbolic charms of a life like that of Jonas Cord, the young, ruthless, Howard Hughes-like figure in The Carpetbaggers who built his inheritance into an aviation and filmmaking empire. “That’s where I got my role model,” Williams later explained. Maybe it was some of Jonas Cord’s kind of ambition that led Ken Williams to become more active in high school, where he joined the band, had a girlfriend, learned how to play the game of good grades, and worked up schemes to make money. (He would later boast that he won so many sales contests on his paper route that he was on a first-name basis with the ticket-takers at Disneyland.) Ken’s inclination toward self-deprecation and his seemingly casual independence masked a fierce determination that showed up even as he was backed into a corner by an ornery Control Data computer in FORTRAN class.

For weeks he struggled, lagging behind his classmates. He had set a problem for himself: to simulate a little mouse running through a maze, following a wall, and getting out of the maze. (It called for a program similar to the old Mouse in the Maze program on the TX-0, where the little mouse tries to find the martini glasses.) With six weeks gone in the nine-week course, Ken was headed toward an F. And there was nothing that Ken Williams, even then, liked about failure. So he kept at it until one day he came to a sudden realization. The computer really wasn’t so smart at all. It was just some dumb beast, following orders, doing what you told it to in exactly the order you determined. You could control it. You could be God.

The mouse got through the maze. Ken Williams got through the course. It was as if a light had gone on in his head, and everyone in the class could see it from the ease with which he turned out code. Ken Williams had something going with the Dumb Beast.

A more important relationship to Ken at the time was his romance with a girl named Roberta Heuer. He had met her in high school, when she was dating a friend of his. Out of the blue, two months after a double date, Ken called her, nervously reminded her who he was and asked her out. Roberta, a demure, passive girl, later said that she hadn’t been that impressed with Ken at first. “He was cute, but I thought he acted kind of dumb. He was shy but [to compensate for it] he would go overboard, acting too aggressive. He carried cigarettes in his pocket, but didn’t smoke. He asked me to go steady the first week [we went out].”

Roberta had been seeing a boy who lived upstate. Ken tried to force her into choosing between them. Roberta might well have decided against this insecure, pushy boy, but one day Ken opened up to her. “He was talking about physics,” Roberta later recalled. “I figured he really was a bright guy. All the boyfriends I’d had before were rather dumb. Ken was talking about real things, responsibility.” She stopped seeing the other boy, and almost instantly Ken pushed for a permanent commitment. “I didn’t want to be alone,” he later reflected.

Roberta talked to her mother about it: “He’s going to go someplace,” she said. “To really make it. Be something.”

Finally Ken told her, “We’re getting married, and that’s it.” She didn’t fight it. She was nineteen; he was a year younger.

Within a year, Roberta was pregnant, and Ken was pulling Ds and worrying about supporting a family. He knew from reading the want ads that there were a lot more jobs in computer programming than there were in physics, so he figured, just like it said on the matchbook covers, that he would find a career for himself in electronic data processing. Roberta’s dad cosigned a student loan for $1,500, tuition for a trade school called Control Data Institute.

The world Ken Williams was entering was nothing like the holy preserve of the MIT AI lab. His would-be colleagues in the business computing field had little of the hands-on hunger that drove the class of Altair graduates who hacked hardware. In the early 1970s the business computer field that Ken was entering was considered the creepiest in America. It was a joke, an occupation where meek little moles did things—who knows what those things were?—to the punch cards and whirring wheels of Hulking Giant computers. As far as the public was concerned, there wasn’t even much difference between the drones who mechanically punched the cards and hammered at the keyboards, and the skilled technicians who programmed the machines to put the cards in their places. They were all seen as the white-shirted, Coke-bottle-glasses moles in the computer room. Creatures of the disembodied age.

If Ken and Roberta had been part of a wide circle of friends, they might have had to confront that stereotype, which Ken did not resemble in the least. But Ken and Roberta did not bother to put down roots or establish close friendships. As a computer programmer, Ken was less a Richard Greenblatt or a Lee Felsenstein than he was Jonas Cord. Later, he would jauntily say, “I guess greed would summarize me better than anything. I always want more.”

Ken Williams was far from a dazzling programmer when he finished Control Data Institute, but he was certainly prepared to do anything required of him. And more. As much work as possible, to help him go as high as he could. Then take on another, more demanding job, whether or not he was qualified. Instead of cleanly breaking with the previous employer, Ken tried to keep on the payroll, in consultant mode.

He would claim to know computer languages and operating systems he knew nothing about, reading a book about the subject hours before a job interview and bullshitting his way into the position. “Well, we’re looking for a programmer in BAL,” they would tell him, referring to an esoteric computer language, and he would laugh almost derisively.

“BAL? I’ve been programming in BAL for three years!”

Then he would immediately rush out to get hold of some books, since he had never even heard of BAL. But by the time the job started he would have procured documentation, uniformly buried in dense, cheaply printed loose-leaf manuals, to fake expertise in the “BAL environment,” or at least buy time until he could get into the machine and divine the secrets of BAL.

No matter where he worked, in any number of nameless service companies in the yawning valley above Los Angeles, Ken Williams did not meet one person who deserved an iota of his respect. He would observe people who’d been programming computers for years and he would say to himself, “Give me a book and in two hours I’ll be doing what they’re doing.” And sure enough, stackloads of manuals and a few fourteen-hour days later, he would at least appear to be one hotshot programmer.

He’d come into the heavily air-conditioned computer sanctums at weird hours of the night to fix a bug, or get the computer back up when one of his programs accidentally fed on itself and tripped the millions of calculations up in such a fury of misunderstanding that nothing the regular crew could think of could revive the machine. But Ken, confident that the stupidity of his colleagues was dwarfed only by the astounding compliance of the Dumb Beast whom he could feed and befriend with his programming skills, would work three days straight, forgetting to even stop for a meal, until the Dumb Beast was back on the job. Ken Williams, hero of the day, tamer of the Dumb Beast, would go home, sleep for a day and a half, then return to work, ready for another marathon. Employers noticed, and rewarded him.

Ken was rising at quantum speed—Roberta figured they moved to various locations in the L.A. area about twelve times in that go-go decade, always making sure that they turned a profit on the house. They had no time for making friends. They felt like loners and misfits, usually the only white-collar family in a blue-collar neighborhood. The consolation was money. “Wouldn’t it be nice to make another two hundred dollars a week?” Roberta would ask, and Ken would get a new job or take on more consulting work . . . but even before Ken had settled into this new job, he and Roberta would be sitting in the tiny living room of whatever house they happened to be living in, and saying, “Wouldn’t it be nice to earn two hundred dollars more?” The pressure never stopped, especially since Ken Williams had idle dreams of fantastic sums of money, money enough to goof off with for the rest of his life—not only all the cash that he and Roberta could spend, but all that his kids could spend, too (Roberta was pregnant by then with the second Williams son, Chris). Wouldn’t it be nice, he thought, to retire at thirty?

By then something else was changing: his relationship with the Dumb Beast. When Ken had time, he would often pull out some of those dense, cheaply printed looseleaf manuals, trying to figure out what made the big Burroughs or IBM or Control Data machine really tick. As he gained proficiency in his profession, he began to respect it more; see how it could approach art. There were layers of expertise that were way beyond what Williams had previously come to assume. A programming pantheon did exist, almost like some sort of old-time philosophical brotherhood.

Ken had gotten a taste of this more exotic realm when he fast-talked his way into a job as systems programmer for Bekins Moving and Storage. Bekins was switching then from a Burroughs computer to a bigger and slightly more interactive IBM machine. Ken baldly fabricated a career history of IBM wizardry for himself, and landed the job.

At Bekins, Ken Williams became hooked on pure programming. His task was installing a heavy-duty telecommunications system on the IBM that would allow one computer to support eight or nine hundred users in the field across the country, and the problems and complications were beyond anything he’d confronted so far. He would experiment with three or four languages that had nothing to do with his job, fascinated with the techniques and mind-frames required with each language. There was a whole world inside this computer . . . a way of thinking. And maybe for the first time Ken Williams was being drawn to the process of computing more than to the goal of completing a task. In other words, hacking.

As a consequence of his sustained interest, Ken remained at Bekins longer than at most of his other employers: a year and a half. It was time well spent, since his next job presented him with an even greater challenge, as well as contacts and ideas which would soon enable him to act out his wildest fantasies.

The company was called Informatics. It was one of a number of firms that sprang up in the mid-sixties to take advantage of a gap in the mainframe computer software field. More and more big companies and government agencies were getting computers, and almost none of the software that the behemoth computer companies supplied could artfully execute the tasks the computers were supposed to perform. So each company had to hire its own programming staff, or rely on highly paid consultants who invariably would disappear just when the system crashed and valuable data came out looking like Russian. A new team of programmers or consultants would then come out to untangle the mess, and the process would repeat itself: starting from scratch, the new team would have to reinvent the wheel.

Informatics and companies like it were set up to sell software that made the Hulking Giants a little more comprehensible. The idea was to invent the wheel once and for all, slam a patent on it, and sell it like crazy. Their programmers would toil away at the assembly level and finally come up with a system that would allow low-level programmers, or even in some cases nonprogrammers, to perform simple computer tasks. After all, these commercial systems all did pretty much the same thing—you had something coming in from a clerk or a branch office on paper which got keypunched and entered into a system which modified some preexisting file. Informatics came up with a pre-programmed system called Mark 4. Sometime in the seventies it became the largest selling mainframe computer software product of all time, approaching at one point $100 million in yearly revenue.

In the late seventies, one of the managers in charge of Informatics’ new products was Dick Sunderland, a former FORTRAN programmer who was climbing the corporate ladder after reluctantly foregoing a late-in-life stab at law school. In place of the law, Sunderland had determined to pursue a romance with a bright and holy concept of management. To be a leader of men, a deft builder of competent, well-meshed employee teams, a persuasive promoter, and a constructive manipulator . . . this was what Dick Sunderland aspired toward.

A small, chalk-complexioned man with hooded eyes and a contemplative drawl, Sunderland considered himself a natural manager. He had always been interested in the advertising, selling, promoting of things. Psychology fascinated him. And he was especially enamored of the idea of choosing the right people to work together so that their joint output dwarfed the measly sum of their individual inputs.

Dick was trying to do that at Informatics with his new product team. He already had one genuine wizard on the staff, a lean, quiet man in his forties named Jay Sullivan. Jay was a former jazz pianist who had come to Informatics from a more mundane job in his native Chicago. He later explained why: “Systems software [at Informatics] was much more interesting. You didn’t have to worry about mundane things like applications or payrolls. It was much more real programming to me; you dealt more in the essence of what programming was about. The actual techniques of programming are more important than the specifics of the job at a specific time.” In other words, he could hack there.

In his programming, Sullivan worked like a vacationer who, having planned his trip carefully, educating himself on the subtle characteristics of the local scenery, followed the itinerary with enhanced consciousness. Yet he still retained the curiosity to stray from the plan if circumstances seemed to call for it, and derived pleasure from the careful exploration that such a fork in his path would involve, not to mention the sense of accomplishment when the detour proved successful.

As with many hackers, Sullivan’s immersion in programming had taken its social toll. Sullivan later explained that with computers “you can create your own universe, and you can do whatever you want within that. You don’t have to deal with people.” So while he was a master in his work, Sullivan had the infuriating kind of programmer personality that led him to get on splendidly with computers but not pay much attention to the niceties of human interaction. He would casually insult Dick, and nonchalantly go about his business, doing brilliant things with the operating system, but often would see his innovations die because he was not adept at politicking, a process necessary at the large company. Dick Sunderland had forced himself to be patient with Sullivan, and eventually they had arrived at a seller-inventor relationship which produced two lucrative improvements to the Mark 4 line.

Dick was looking for more master programmers, calling recruiters and making it quite clear that he was looking for cream-of-the-crop people, nothing less. One recruiter mentioned Ken Williams to him. “This kid’s a genius type,” the recruiter said.

Sunderland called in Ken for an interview and made sure that his true genius, Jay Sullivan, would be there to test the mettle of this Williams person. Dick never before had seen anyone stand toe-to-toe with Jay Sullivan, and was curious to see what might come of the interview.

Dick and Jay were talking about a problem in implementing a new, user-friendly language that Informatics was working on when Ken showed up, wearing slacks and a sport shirt which fit so badly that it was obvious T-shirts were his norm. The discussion had been fairly technical, focusing on the problem that to make a language a nonprogrammer would understand—a language like English—one would have to avoid any kind of ambiguous words or acronyms.

Suddenly Jay Sullivan turned to Ken and said, “What do you think of the word ‘any’?”

Without hesitation, Ken correctly asserted that it was a very valuable word, but an ambiguous word nonetheless . . . and then extemporaneously tossed off ideas about how that word might be handled.

It seemed to Dick that he was witnessing a classic battle—the cheeky Pomona Kid versus venerable Chicago Slim. While Ken had a charismatic quality to him, and obviously knew computers, Dick still had his money on Jay. Jay did not let him down. After Ken stopped, Jay, speaking quietly and methodically, “sliced Ken up with a razor blade,” Dick later recalled, enumerating the errors and incompleteness of Ken’s thoughts. Yet it was impressive to Dick—and even to Jay—that this college dropout could even think such thoughts. What’s more, rather than being dissuaded by Jay’s broadside, Ken came right back. Dick watched the two pick up threads of each other’s ideas and weave them into more refined concepts. This was synergy, the manager’s holy grail, Dick decided to hire Ken Williams.

Dick put Ken under Jay’s supervision, and the two of them would chatter about programming arcana for hours. For Ken it was an education: he was learning the psychology of computerdom in a way he never had. Of course, one part of the job that Ken Williams did not like was having a boss; Ken in this regard was a typical antibureaucratic hacker. So he came to dislike Dick, with all his schedules and fixation on managerial details—obstacles to the free flow of information.

Ken and Jay would be talking about the intricacies of some aspect of programming language—like trying to figure out, when somebody says “List by customer,” what that really means. Does it mean “SORT by customer,” or perhaps “List ALL customers”? Or maybe “List ANY customers”? (That word again.) The computer had to be programmed so it wouldn’t screw up on any of those interpretations. At the very least it should know when to ask users to clarify their meaning. This took a language of considerable flexibility and elegance, and though Ken and his new guru Jay might not have said it out loud, a task of that sort goes a bit beyond technology and into primal linguistics. After all, once you get waist-deep into a discussion about the meaning of the word “any,” it’s only a short step to thinking philosophically about existence itself.

Somewhere in the midst of one of these conversations Dick would come in, eager to witness some synergy among his troops. “We’d try to supersubset it so that a two-year-old would understand, ask Dick’s opinion, he’d give it, and we’d chase him out of the room,” Ken later recalled. “Dick never understood what we were putting up. He was obviously out of his league.”

At those times Ken might have felt superior to Dick, but in retrospect he had to admit that Dick was smart enough to recognize talent. Ken realized that he was one of the weaker members of a superteam of programmers who were doing great stuff for Informatics. Sometimes Ken figured that Dick must have gotten lucky, accidentally corralling five of the most creative people around for his new products team. Either that or he was the best manager in the world, or at least the best talent evaluator.

Ken, always needing more money, began moonlighting. Sunderland was refusing his constant requests for raises, and when Ken suggested that he might like to head a programming group, Dick, a little astounded perhaps at the chutzpah of this brilliant but scattershot kid, flatly denied the request. “You have no talent for management,” said Dick, and Ken Williams never forgot that. Ken was regularly going home to Roberta and complaining about Dick—how mean he was, how strict, how he had no understanding of people and their problems—but it was less a dissatisfaction with his boss than his desire for more money, money for a bigger house, a faster car, a CB radio, a motorcycle, a hot tub, more electronic gadgets, that led him to double and even triple up on work, often phasing into a no-sleep mode. Eventually the outside work got to be more than the inside work, and he left Informatics in 1979, becoming an independent consultant.

First there was a guy with a scheme to do tax returns for big companies like General Motors and Shell, and then there was some work with Warner Brothers, programming a system for the record company to keep artists’ royalties straight. There was a bookkeeping system he constructed for Security Pacific Banks, something about foreign tax plans. Ken was becoming a finance guru; the thirty thousand a year he was pulling down looked to be only the beginning, if Ken kept hustling.

He and Roberta began weaving a little fantasy. At night—the nights Ken wasn’t out consulting for someone—they would sit in the hot tub and talk about splitting the Simi Valley suburban trap and moving to the woods. Where they would go water skiing, snow skiing . . . just goof off. Of course there weren’t nearly as many hours in a day to make money to turn that kind of trick, no matter how many companies Ken set up tax programs for. So the fantasy was just that, a fantasy.

Until Ken’s little brother Larry got an Apple Computer.

Larry brought it over to Ken’s office one day. To Ken, who had been dealing with telecommunications networks that handled two thousand people all at once, who had invented entire computer languages with mainframe wizards the likes of Jay Sullivan, the idea of this sleek, beige machine being a computer seemed in one sense ludicrous. “It was a toy compared to the computers I’d been using,” he later explained. “A piece of junk, a primeval machine.”

On the other hand, there were plenty of things that the Apple offered that Ken’s Hulking Giants did not provide. Up till the time he worked at Informatics, his computers had been batch processed, loading dread punch cards. The Apple at least was interactive. And when you got down to it, it was fairly powerful, especially compared to the big machines of less than a decade ago. (MIT’s Marvin Minsky once estimated that an Apple II had the virtual power of the PDP-1.) And it ran pretty fast, almost comparable to a big machine, because on a time-sharing mainframe you’re fighting for CPU time with eight hundred people all trying to grind their code through at once, with the Dumb Beast sweating silicon trying to parcel out nanoseconds to each user. You shared your Apple with no one. In the middle of the night, it was just sitting there in the house, waiting for you and you alone. Ken Williams decided he had to have one.

So in January 1980 he scraped together “every cent I had,” as he later told it, and bought an Apple II. But it took a while to understand how significant a machine it was. Ken figured that everybody with an Apple was like him, a technician or engineer. It seemed logical that what these people really wanted was a powerful language to run on their computer. No one had yet done FORTRAN for the Apple. Hardly anyone had done anything on the Apple at that point, but Ken was thinking like a hacker, unable to envision anything neater than something to use the computer with. The Tools-to-Make-Tools syndrome. (Richard Greenblatt’s first big project on the PDP-1 was a FORTRAN implementation, for much the same reason.) At that point Ken was unable to conceive that the Apple and small machines like it had opened the field of recreational computing to others besides hackers.

The irony of it was that, even as Ken planned to write a FORTRAN for the Apple, this more significant revolution in computing was happening right there in his own house.

For most of her life Roberta Williams had been timid. There was a dreamy quality about her, and her doll-like brown eyes, long brown hair, and frilly, feminine wardrobe—bell sleeves, suede boots, Peter Pan collars—indicated that this was a woman who’d had a childhood rich in fantasy. In fact, Roberta Williams’ early daydreaming had taken on almost supernatural proportions. She had always pictured herself in strange situations. At night she would lie in bed and construct what she referred to as “my movies.” One night pirates would kidnap her and she would devise elaborate escape plans, often involving some dashing savior. Another night she would be in ancient Greece. Always dreaming of things happening to her.

Daughter of a frugal agricultural inspector in Southern California, she was painfully shy, and the relative isolation of her rural home reinforced that. “I never really liked myself,” she would later reflect. “I always wanted to be someone else.” She felt her parents doted on her younger brother, who suffered from epilepsy. Her form of entertainment was telling stories that would enthrall her elders, and enrapture her brother, who took the stories literally. But as she got older, and coped with dating and the grown-up world, “all that got thrown out the window,” as she says now. When she and Ken married, she passively expected him to make a living; as for herself, she was so shy she, “could hardly make a phone call.” The storytelling remained buried.

Then one night Ken, who had brought a computer terminal home, called Roberta over to show her this program that someone had put on the IBM mainframe computer he was connected to. “Come on over here, Roberta,” he urged, sitting on the green-carpeted floor of the spare bedroom where he’d put the terminal. “See this—it’s a really fun game.”

Roberta didn’t want anything to do with it. First of all, she didn’t like games too much. Second, it was on a computer. Though much of Ken’s life was spent communicating with computers, they were still unfriendly ciphers to Roberta. But Ken was persistent, and finally cajoled her to sit at the terminal to see what this thing was about. This is what she saw:

It was Adventure, the game written at the Stanford AI lab by hacker Don Woods, the Tolkienesque game which lured hackers and users into immersing themselves in a magical dungeon world. And from the moment Roberta Williams tentatively poked GO EAST she was totally and irrevocably hooked. “I just couldn’t stop. It was compulsive. I started playing it and kept playing it. I had a baby at the time, Chris was eight months old; I totally ignored him. I didn’t want to be bothered. I didn’t want to stop and make dinner.” She didn’t want to do anything except figure out how to get to Witt’s End or get around the snake. She would be up until four in the morning, trying to figure out how to get around the damn snake to get to the giant clams. And then she would sit up in bed thinking, What didn’t I do? What else could I have done? Why couldn’t I open that stupid clam? What’s in it?

At first Ken participated, but he soon lost interest. Roberta thought this was because Ken never liked it when Adventure got sarcastic. You would say KILL DRAGON and it would come back and say WHAT, WITH YOUR BARE HANDS? You couldn’t get mad, you had to ignore it. And you certainly couldn’t be sarcastic back, just say, “Yes,” And it said WITH YOUR BARE HANDS YOU KILL THE DRAGON AND HE’S LYING DEAD AT YOUR FEET. You killed the dragon! You could go on. Roberta approached the game with methodical intensity, drawing elaborate maps and anticipating what was around every turn. Ken thought it was amazing that one day Roberta couldn’t stand computers and the next day he couldn’t get her away from the terminal. Finally, after a month of ratiocination about trolls, axes, misty caverns, and vast halls, Roberta solved Adventure. She was desperate to find more games like it.

By then, Ken had bought the Apple. Despite her newfound interest in computers, Roberta was less than thrilled at the two-thousand-dollar purchase. If Ken wanted it so badly, she told him, he should try to make money from it. This coincided perfectly with Ken’s desires at the time, which were to write a FORTRAN compiler for the Apple and sell it for bundles of money to the engineers and technicians who wanted Tools to Make Tools. He hired five part-time programmers to help him implement the compiler. Ken’s house, a typical Simi Valley four-bedroom, two-thousand-square-foot tract home, became headquarters for the FORTRAN project.

Meanwhile Roberta had heard that there were some Adventure-style games available for the Apple. Roberta bought some at a computer store in nearby Northridge in the San Fernando Valley, but she found them too easy. She wanted her newly awakened imagination to be as taxed and teased as it was before. She began sketching out an adventure game of her own.

She started by writing out a story about a “mystery house,” and things that happened in it. The story had much to do with Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians; another inspiration was the board game Clue. Instead of just finding treasures as in Adventure, this game would have you do some detective work. Roberta mapped out the story just as she mapped out an adventure game when she played it. Along the way, she devised puzzles, character traits, events, and landmarks. After a couple of weeks she had a stack of papers with maps and dilemmas and plot turns and twists, and she flopped it down in front of Ken and said, “Look what I did!”

Ken told Roberta that her little stack of papers was very nice and she should run along and finish it. No one really wanted to use a personal computer as a game machine—they were for engineers who wanted to figure out how to design circuits or solve triple-x exponential equations.

Not long after, Ken and Roberta were at the Plank House in the Valley, a redwood-walled steak house where they often dined, and there he finally listened to his delicate wife describing how her game put you in an old Victorian house in which your friends were being killed off one by one. She described a few of the dilemmas, and told of a secret passageway. It began to sound good to Ken. Ken Williams could usually smell some money to be made, and he thought that there might be enough bread in this for a trip to Tahiti or some new furniture.

“This sounds great,” he told her, “but to really sell you need more. An angle. Something different.”

As it happened, Roberta had been thinking lately how great it would be if an adventure game were accompanied by pictures on the computer screen. You could see where you were instead of just reading it. She had no idea if this was possible on an Apple or any kind of computer. How would you even get a picture into a computer?

Ken guessed they could try.

As it happened, a device called a VersaWriter had just been released. It was a tablet that you drew on and it registered the shapes into an Apple computer. But it didn’t draw very accurately, and it was hard to control the writing mechanism, which was like the clunky base of a desk lamp. Worst of all, it cost two hundred dollars. Ken and Roberta decided to shoot the dice and spring for it. Ken then reprogrammed the whole thing so Roberta could do something with it. Eventually she made a few dozen black-and-white pictures of rooms inside the Mystery House, with people drawn only slightly better than stick figures. Then Ken coded the game logic, after figuring out how to pack seventy pictures onto one floppy disk—a task which any programmer in the least familiar with the Apple would have guessed was impossible. The secret was not storing data for entire pictures, but using assembly-language commands which stored coordinates of the individual lines in each picture; as each new picture was due to appear, the computer would follow the commands to draw the picture. It was a dazzling program bum that characterized Ken’s facility for top-level hacking.

The whole thing took a month.

Ken scrapped the FORTRAN project and took the game to a software distributing company called Programma. It was the biggest distributor of Apple software in the world. In early 1980, that was not saying too much. It sold a range of programs with names like Biorhythm, Nude Lady, Vegas Style Keno, State Capitals, and Apple Flyswatter. Most of the games were written in BASIC (as opposed to the much faster-running assembly language) and could entertain only a toddler or a person in love with the idea of playing with a computer. There were enough of the latter to jack Programma’s gross up to $150,000 a month.

The Programma people loved Mystery House. Here was an assembly-language adventure game that was well planned, challenging—and had pictures. The fact that the pictures were in black and white and looked like something young D.J. Williams (age six) might have drawn was irrelevant. No one else had done anything like it. They offered Ken a twenty-five percent royalty on the $12 wholesale price, and assured him they could sell five hundred copies a month for six months, which at $3 a copy would be $9,000. This was almost twice the amount that Ken had been promised for the FORTRAN compiler—before splitting it with his five programmers. All for Roberta’s silly game.

Ken Williams also considered selling the game directly to Apple Computer. He sent a sample, but waited over a month and got no reply. (A year later, Apple—now a large company with a slow-moving bureaucracy, wrote back and said, yes, maybe we might like to consider buying this. This said a lot more about what Apple Computer had become than it did about Mystery House.) Ken and Roberta did not take Programma’s offer. Ken and Roberta wanted all the money. Why not try to sell it independently? If it doesn’t work, then take it to Programma.

So the Williamses started taking Mystery House around to the few computer stores in the area. The people at the stores would be skeptical at first—after all, excited new computer fanatics, intoxicated with the power lent them by their new Apples and Radio Shack TRS-80s and PET computers, were always trying to sell strange programs. But then Roberta’s game would boot with a picture of an old house drawn on the computer’s high-resolution (hi-res) screen rather than the computer’s clunky, block-oriented lo-res one. The people at the stores would ask how Ken did that. After a few experiences like that, Ken and Roberta figured they might be able to make as much as one or two thousand dollars a month from this software-selling thing.

The next step was advertising the product in a magazine. But as long as they were doing that, they figured, why not offer a couple more games, and look like a real company? They already had a name: On-Line Systems—a holdover from Ken’s vision of selling the respectable kind of business software for the Apple that he did in his consulting for online computer firms. Ken went to a friend and asked him to be On-Line’s first outside programmer. In return for eventual royalties, the friend did a simple black-and-white shoot-one-dot-with-another-dot game called Skeet Shoot. They printed up some advertising fliers and documentation sheets—unwilling to pay the one-hundred-dollar typesetting fee, Roberta cut the individual letters out of magazines and got that “master” printed by a local copy shop. It came back with little lines that betrayed its cut-and-paste origin, but they had already spent five hundred dollars. Anyway, that form of packaging was state of the art at that time. This was the computer world, where the packaging didn’t matter. What mattered was the magic that happened when all those binary connections were made. Marketing was second to substance.

Mystery House, or “Hi-Res Adventure #1,” was priced at $24.95. Ken and Roberta, in a fit of optimism, had bought a box of one hundred blank disks at the nearby Rainbow Computing store, and once the fliers were sent to computer stores and the ad placed for a reluctantly paid two-hundred-dollar fee in the May 1980 issue of a small magazine called MICRO, they waited. The phone rang on that first day in May, and then there was a break and then it rang again. And from then on, it would be a long time before Ken and Roberta could count on their phone not ringing.

Ken and Roberta made eleven thousand dollars that May. In June, they made twenty thousand dollars. July was thirty thousand. Their Simi Valley house was becoming a money machine. Ken would go off to work at Financial Decisions, where he was now programming for around forty-two thousand a year, and Roberta would copy disks and put the disks, along with the fliers and inserts, into a Ziploc bag. She would also take care of the kids and put the programs in boxes and keep the house clean and send programs out by UPS. At night Roberta was designing a longer and better adventure game based on the world of fairy tales.

Every few minutes the phone would ring and it would most likely be someone ready to absolutely die unless they got a hint to unstick them from a seemingly hopeless situation in Mystery House. People who called the number shown on the flier included in the Ziploc bag with the floppy disk were under the impression that On-Line was some big conglomerate, and they couldn’t believe their luck in somehow connecting with the actual author of the program. “I’m talking to the person who wrote the game?” Yeah, in her kitchen. Roberta would give them a hint—never a straight answer: part of the fun was working it out for yourself—and chat with them a while. The energy level was contagious. People were going loony over playing with computers.

Ken Williams was carrying a full work load at Financial Decisions, developing a complicated finance system and heading the data processing department. At night, he would work on the Apple, hacking a new machine-language system for Roberta’s new adventure game. On weekends, Ken would make the rounds of the computer stores. It was clear that the software business required his full time.

Roberta thought that as long as Ken was thinking of quitting, they might as well live out their longtime dream of moving to the woods. Her parents lived near Yosemite, above the town of Oakhurst, and it was even more rural and quiet than the place Roberta grew up in and still remembered fondly. It would be perfect for the kids. So they did it. “I’m going to move to the mountains,” he told an astounded Dick Sunderland at a party in mid 1980. Dick and Ken were in a room a bit away from the party noise, and Ken said, “Here I am, twenty-five years old, and the Apple Computer has enabled me to fulfill my dream: living in the woods and living in a log cabin and writing software.”

Ken and Roberta bought the first country house they looked at, a three-bedroom, rustic, wooden A-frame cabin on Mudge Ranch Road just outside Coarsegold, California.

By then, they had finished Roberta’s fairy-tale game, Wizard and the Princess. It was twice as long as Mystery House, and ran faster thanks to Ken’s improvements on the program logic. Ken had developed a whole new assembly-language interpreter for writing adventure games; he called it ADL, or Adventure Development Language. Also, this “Hi-Res Adventure #2” had over one hundred and fifty pictures. Ken had devised subroutines that allowed Roberta to enter the pictures into the computer as easily as if she were drawing on a regular tablet. This time the pictures were in color; Ken used a technique called "dithering" to blend the six colors of the Apple, mixing dot by dot, to get twenty-one colors. He was performing stunts on the Apple that Steve Wozniak never dreamed of. Magic stuff.

The game’s only problem was the first puzzle, where the adventurer, on his way to rescue Princess Priscilla of Serenia from Wizard Harlin, had to get past a snake. The answer was rather obscure: you had to pick up a rock and use it to kill the snake, but unless you chose a rock in one specific location (they all looked alike) you got bit by a scorpion and died. Most people started banging their heads against the wall at the third or fourth scorpion bite. Eventually, after countless frustrated adventurers made calls to Roberta’s kitchen in Coarsegold (East Coast people sometimes would call at 6 A.M. California time), On-Line began supplying a hint to that dilemma in every package.

Snake or not, Wizard and the Princess eventually sold over sixty thousand copies at $32.95. Ken and Roberta would sit in the hot tub they’d installed and shake their heads, saying, “Do you believe this?”

On December 1 of that first year, after the business had already changed their lives, got them a new house, and made them the rising stars of the Apple world, they finally moved the business out of the house to a space on the second floor of a two-story building in Oakhurst, seven miles up Route 41. Their neighbor was a religious promoter who was unsuccessfully trying to book Little Richard on a national preaching tour. You could hear him shouting through the thin walls.

Early in 1981, less than a year after the company began with a few floppy disks and a $150 ad in a little magazine, Roberta described the situation in a letter to another small magazine: “We opened an office December 1, 1980, and hired our first employee to help us with the shipping and the phones. Two weeks later, we hired somebody to help her, one week after that we hired somebody to help them. We just hired a full-time programmer this week, and we need at least another programmer. Our business is growing by leaps and bounds, and there’s no end in sight.”