Each of them has always taken pride in being the smartest guy in the room - but hey, now they're all in the same room. John Schwartz reports from this year's Computer Bowl, where the East evened the score.
There are few rooms in the known universe where lyrics like this - especially when accompanied by accordion - would go over: Lady of Spain, I upload you/Send me your FAQ, I'll decode you....
But then, let's be honest. That one even bombed here - but at least everyone in the audience got the joke. And they also knew that the gag wouldn't cost the laughmeister, David House, his day job as a top exec for Intel.
Because this was The Computer Bowl, an annual fund-raiser for The Computer Museum in Boston and one of the rare tribal gatherings for the computer industry's pioneers. The Bowl is patterned after the old College Bowl game shows, but all of the questions are about computers. Which is as it should be, because these are the folks who made it all possible. You can call it a trivia contest if you like, but to these guys it's money in the bank. The players are drawn from the ranks of the industry's legends. Take Bob Frankston, the co-creator of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet, and David Liddle, who runs Paul Allen's Interval Research but first made his mark as one of the smartest smart guys at Xerox PARC. Each of them has always taken pride in being the smartest guy in the room - but hey, now they're all in the same room.
The aforementioned room, of course, is appropriately done up. It's the San Jose Civic Auditorium, disguised as the inside of a huge PC - and, since the set was a borrowed Intel Comdex stage - featuring a prominently displayed Pentium chip. No wonder the auditorium seemed hot.
This year's event was the All-Star Game, a showdown for the top players from the previous five games. Those contests ended with three wins for the West Coast and two wins for the East; the East was out to even the score on the only battlefield that matters: nerd knowledge.
Imagine for a moment GE's John Welch putting on silly clothes to match wits with, say, Henry Kravis. No way.
But this is the computer industry. It's different: wonkishly proud and gloriously uncool. And rich, of course: since its inception in 1988, the Bowl, presented by the Association for Computing Machinery, has raised more than US$4 million for the Museum.
"Ladies and gentlemen, hackers of all ages," says emcee Stewart Cheifet, host of the PBS show Computer Chronicles, introducing the bout. "It is the revenge of the nerds, the ultimate moment of geek glory!"
"Who knows more about computers?" Cheifet asks. "The people from the East Coast, who brought us mainframes and minicomputers? Or the people from the West Coast, who brought us silicon chips and personal computers?"
They were all Wunderkinder once, but many of them are now going gray. And several of the jaunty baseball-style T-shirts they've agreed to wear pull tight over spare tires.
So, while nobody's taking any of this seriously, and it's all for a good cause and everyone on stage is buddy-buddy, you can't help but feel the room tense up as Mitch Kapor and Bill Gates go head to head on a question. (You know the history, but here's the recap: Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corp., walked away from the job in 1986 because the company had gotten too big and it just wasn't fun any more - in no small part, it was said, because Bill Gates and Microsoft had helped turn software into just another cutthroat business. Kapor went on to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, fighting for civil liberties in cyberspace, while Bill Gates went on to amass more money than god. The people in the audience at the Bowl, of course, knew all of this and more.)
Questioner Andy Grove, the Intel CEO, asks the players to multiply 11 by 11 - in base 89. Kapor takes the bait, struggling for a moment, and answers: "It's going to be one, and whatever stands for 22." The judges say "No" and the crowd breaks up, but Kapor's wide-eyed shrug seems to say, "You do it, then." Gates can't resist: He buzzes. He gropes. "132."
Host Stewart Cheifet explains, "That's not the correct answer either. The correct answer is 121 because it's always 121 except for base 2."
Oh, yeah, right, murmurs the crowd.
Grove smirks. "Obvious," he intones, shaking his head.
Gates, however, successfully guessed the annual cost of the electricity required to run all the world's personal computers each year - $4.6 billion. His math apparently gets better when he works with really big numbers.
Questions ranged from the obscure to the historical. What did computer pioneer Alan Turing do in the woods to guard against wartime inflation? (Buried two silver ingots.) How many buttons did Doug Engelbart's first mouse have? (Three.) Was the internal pre-release name of Borland's Quattro spreadsheet: 1) Buddha, 2) Rows and Columns, or 3) Spreadsheets R Us? (Buddha, based on Borland' s pun (and hope) that Quattro would "assume the Lotus position.")
This bowl is more low-key than previous bouts - it is another time around for each player, after all - but still they tense at the buzzers, waiting to slap before some other millionaire can make a move. Liddle buzzes the moment he hears the letters "ATM," and blurts out the words "Asynchronous Transfer Mode" - but oooh! It's a sucker-punch: the question is actually about Automated Teller Machines.
At half time this year, the players leave the stage for a charity auction. The audience bids up to $3,600 for a book of essays on Albert Einstein autographed by the scientist, while one of Kapor's old Hawaiian shirts pulls in $1,300.
Then the bidding heads into the stratosphere. Gates has come to sit in the audience, and he gets into competition with Gordon Bell, the computing pioneer who developed the phenomenal VAX minicomputer for Digital Equipment Corp. The prize: being publisher for a week of Computerworld, the trade journal, and visiting one of the newspaper's offices around the world. With the combined skills of an auctioneer and a stand-up comic, Christie's auctioneer Ursula Hermacinski gets them up to $28,000 before Gates drops out. (Later, at the after-dinner bash, Patrick McGovern, CEO of Computerworld's corporate parent, offers Gates a week of his own on the condition that he match Bell's price. Gates agrees. It's cheaper than buying Computerworld outright, though of course he could do that, too, if he wanted.)
The last buzzer sounds, and the East takes it, 190-150, evening the ongoing battle, 3-3. The top scorers - Liddle and David Nelson, senior software consultant for Novell Multimedia - each receive one of the treasures of the Computer Museum: memory cores from MIT's original Whirlwind computer, the machine that began the museum's collection. The tiny metal donuts suspended in the latticework of wires are stunning works of techno-art: Liddle regards his with something like awe. All those zillionaires - they're just guys. He's holding history.
More Computer Bowl questions:
Supercomputers used for DNA sequencing played a major role in the movie Jurassic Park. What brand of supercomputers were used for DNA sequencing in the novel Jurassic Park?
Cray - though the more photogenic Thinking Machines appeared in the movie version.
Where does the "Gopher" search software on the Internet get its name?
The University of Minnesota's burrowing mascot.
What is Bill Clinton's Internet e-mail address?
president@whitehouse.gov.
What does the acronym "Sega" stand for?
Service Games.
Of the following, who does not wear earrings: Jean Louis-Gassee, Steven Wallach, or Philippe Kahn?
Kahn.
In what 1974 movie did George Segal have a computer implanted in his brain?
The Terminal Man.
True or false: the US Department of Defense got permission from Ada Lovelace's descendants to use the name Ada for the high-level language?
True.
