Show Stopper!
INTRODUCTION
DAVID N.Cutler, wearing white Reeboks, white pants and a T-shirt bearing(to carry something so that it can be seen) the legend OVER THE LINE, bursts into(闯入) the Build Lab and takes the stock of the largest, most complex program ever created for a personal computer.
It is 10:20 in the morning, and the latest "build" of the program, called Window NT, is hours late.Cutler, is the leader of the team making NT, is angry about the delay, angry about a botched test the day before, angry at the world.He knows that nothing slows progress more than a steady accumulation(积累) of small lapses(in easy, comfortable conditions, and enjoying the advantages of being rich 生活优裕；养尊处优
), and he is bent on pushing ahead.
Cutler insists(坚持) on frequent builds, or samples, of NT so that his 250 programmers can "eat their own dog food."It is a frustrating(令人懊恼的) experience, not unlike building a house from scratch(without any previous preparation or knowledge 从头开始；从零开始 ) while living in it.The sooner a build arrives, the sooner his team will test their latest creation, discover its imperfections and improve it.
Scowling, Cutler now slumps into a swivel(旋轴) chair and glares(to look at somebody/something in an angry way ) at the computer screen before him. He hits a few keys and groans(抱怨(声)).
Cutler's unhappiness is contagious(a contagious disease spreads by people touching each other （疾病）接触传染的). Three builders, who stitch together NT with the aid of computers, hover behind Cutler, busying themselves while Cutler churns. One, a shoeless and jittery young man, juggles three rubber balls. He is surrounded by dozens of computers. The voice of Aretha Franklin, romping through "Dr. Feelgood,"fills the room from the stereo speakers mounted on the wall.
No fan of juggling or Aretha, Cutler growls. He jumps to his feet, flinging the chair behind him, and storms out of the lab. The shoeless juggler and the chief builder dip into a big jar of Rolaids, popping one each. The day has soured early.
Minutes later, Cutler returns to the Build Lab even more upset. His bowlegged gait and burly arms remind people of Popeye. "You're wasting the whole goddamn morning not having this goddamn thing ready," he snaps.Then, sounding dejected, he tells the juggler, "Call me if you ever get this [build] out today."
His face reddening even more, Cutler leaves again, steaming.His rough creed forbids his from containing his emotions. "The way you let off stress is to let it out," he says.He isn't too particular about how he does it. A circle drawn on the wall near the door marks the spot where he once unleashed a violent kick, cracking his toe. Just the other day, he smashed a wall with his fist, which ordinarily would not have caused a stir except that this time he hit a stud and broke a finger.
Cutler's impatience is ill mannered but understandable.Time means everything to him now. He is a year behind schedule, and after years of work his team is tired and frustrated. Only the enormity of their goal sustains them now. The 250 members of the team aim to produce a computer program so powerful and versatile that someday everyone will need it. Standing in their way are thousands of bugs, or coding errors, and persistent doubts about the basic design of NT, which stands for "New Technology."
Rather than a single entity, NT consists of scores of intertwined programs that together comprise an operating system. This software turns a personal computer into a precise tool of thought, helping a person or an organization control its most valuable asset: information. NT exerts its power through a dizzying succession of ordinary actions. Seemingly at once, it may open a computer file, move text or graphics from one place to another on a screen, print a letter, calculate a row of numbers and keep several word processors, spreadsheets and other applications from getting in each others' way. NT's most profound benefits are hidden.Its invisible acts sustain a computer much as unconscious acts -- taking a breath, blinking an eye, hearing a sound -- sustain a human life.
NT is alarmingly complex. Consisting of six million lines of code. the program is among humanity's most intricate handiworks."No one mind can comprehend it all," Cutler says.
A system as complicated as NT requires a rich patron. In William H. Gates, NT has one of the richest. Gates is cofounder and chief execute of Microsoft Corp., the word's largest software maker. With NT, Gates seeks to extend his software dominion from desktop software, which he monopolizes, to the network.In the 1980s, Microsoft's DOS and Windows system software defined the way most people worked with computers.In the 1990s, the company aims to define the software that electronically ties together workers and business, consumers and homes. The making of NT, Gates hopes, will be the first step toward realizing this grand dream.
Gates also intends to bring full circle the computer revolution of the past half century. NT marks the latest chapter in the decades-long push to free software from the clutches of hardware. Until now, the structure of a computer determined the shape of its software.If a certain type of computer died, the software died with it. NT puts software at the center of computing, lending programs some universality by letting them take advantage of the best computers available -- and to survive even after their chosen hardware dies.
The making of NT is at once a primer on software, a portrait of a community of programmers and a gritty melodrama about the perilous task of managing complexity in an age of information. As people an machines come to depend wholly and unreservedly on computes for everything from air traffic control to medical diagnostics, good code is crucial to the smooth running of a society.And writing good code is increasingly the work of large teams.Yet such teams often sink into mediocrity because their size alone can breed bureaucracy and sterility. The challenge for every large team is to organize its diverse talents while encouraging leadership and flexibility.
Cutler excels at this balancing act; he is uniquely suited to bring Gates's dream to fruition. A star player and a star coach rolled into one, he sets priorities, writes crucial pieces of code and reviews the work of others. But the price of his leadership is stark. Most of his followers live one-dimensional lives: Work pervades their existence. Friends fade into the background.The tie of marriage fray or rip apart. Children are neglected or deferred. Hobbies wither. Computer code comes to mean everything.If private dreams are nursed at all, it is only to ease the pain of creating NT.
Those who fight against immersion int Cutler's world -- and some stubbornly do -- risk incurring their leader's wrath or, worse, losing his respect. Those who succumb to his will are amply rewarded, earning millions of dollars in Microsoft stock bonuses.Yet even these workers are not exempt from the insecurity of the workplace. The place of technical change and the pressure of competition lend a door-die quality to their jobs. They pour their entire spirit into work because there is no alternative.
Cutler embodies the sobering side of today's workplace.He rejects the distinction between work and leisure, job and family, home and office. The very harshness of his ethic strangely intoxicates his acolytes.He presents a world in which great deeds occur against a bleak backdrop.The enemies are laziness, confusion and incompetence.Each member of team hungers to transcend his own frailties."Our work is really, really hard,"Cutler says."Years from now people on the team are going to look back with pride.They will say,Never before did I accomplish so much or was my life so simple. I didn't have to worry about my career or my happiness or whether I got along with my boss or my friends.I had only one concern -- to ship this product. And to make it as good as I could."
When he first conceived of Windows NT, Cutler only dimply saw the path ahead. Building this most complicated of all PC software programs took him and his loyalists deep into the digital wilderness.For a time, it seemed as if they might never emerge whole from their adventure.Some lost piece of themselves along the way.Others Saw the act of their lives cross the blurry border that marks the known from the unknown.And in the end, they grasped that every worthwhile creation is at once an act of love and an act of violence.
This is their story.
CODE WARRIOR
DAVE Cutler was reared on adversity. He learned at a young age to care for himself, to keep his own counsel, to find a way around or through the obstacles in his path.
He was born on March 13, 1942, in Lansing, the state capital of Michigan.Lansing was auto country, home to a slew of car and car-parts makers.His father, Neil, worked in Lansing's Oldsmobile plant for nearly his entire life, first in the plant's shipping department and then as a janitor.
Neil Cutler was an intelligent and exacting man, but he was quiet an lacked ambition.He had been stricken with rheumatic fever as a boy, and it had left him too frail to play sports. Poor eyesight made it difficult for him to enjoy the outdoors.A certain bitterness crept into him.He was not sociable; he truck some as almost a hermit.At home, he could be unpredictable, angry and gruff.He drank.
Arleta, Neil's wife, raised her son Dave and his older sister,Bonnie, in an apartment above the home of Neil's parents in DeWitt, a town of some one thousand people about eight miles north of Lansing. DeWitt was surrounded by farmland and consisted mainly of retired farmers who had moved off their farms and into the town. When Dave was eight the Cutler moved out of town to a forty-acre spread.The land wasn't suitable for farming and did not contain a dwelling.Neil built a small home, one side of which was literally carved out of the earth. By then Arleta had given birth to two more children. The family seemed to spend all its time together in one large room.Arleta kept a large garden, and the family planted pine trees on the land.In time thousands of trees took root and grew.
From the age of ten David Cutler earned money whenever he could. He mainly worked during the summertime for the many farmers in the area, building barns or doing odd jobs.One summer, he worked in a fertilizer plant. Another year he collected old newspaper with a friend, filling an entire trailer for sale to a recycler.
As a teenager, Cutler was drawn to sports.With a graduating class of thirty-four students,his tiny high school pressed him into service.He ran track and played baseball,basketball and football.He was cocaptain of the basketball team and the quarterback of the football team.In one game,he ran for two touchdowns, running almost the entire length of the field for one score.He was very fast.
The local newspaper treated Cutler as a star, chronicling his exploits.Neil skipped nearly all of his son's games; it took a personal invitation from the football coach for him even to consider attending the one game during his son's senior year in which every player's father was introduced. Neil (who went) said hi disliked sports, but Arleta suspected that jealousy had kept her husband from the sidelines.
Father and son were distant.While still in high school, Cutler moved out of his parents' home for a time, living first with the family of a baseball coach and then with Bonnie.At school, meanwhile, Cutler did well enough without studying hard. Graduating in June 1960,Cutler seemed serene about his prospects.Somewhere inside him sprang a confidence bordering on arrogance and a belief that he could be the best at anything he tackled.Others shared Cutler's buoyant sense of himself.In his high school yearbook,classmates captured his specialness in a line beneath his photograph:
"None but himself could be his parallel."
A small Michigan college called Oliver cobbled together several athletic and academic scholarships, offering them as a package to Cutler. He signed on.His freshman year, he started at quarterback,calling and directing his own plays just like a pro.He threw the ball well and ran one hundred yards fast -- in less than eleven seconds. He was about five feet nine inches tall,weighed about 175 pounds and had thick, strong legs.His coach, Stu Parsell, called his "a one-in-a-million player" and marveled at his elusiveness. Cutler was a wily player who confessed he "loved to run over people."
In the huddle,Cutler smartly dished out assignment in between plays.He brooked no dissent,berating teammates for their lapses and telling them:"This huddle is my territory When you're in it, shut up."When players"screwed up,"he said,"I'd really ride them,telling them what to do...to get out there and do their job."
Coach Parsell realized that Cutler relied on more than athletic skills."He was smart enough to know he couldn't win alone,"Parsell said."He brought the other players up with him.They rose to him."The team responded to his brash assertions because Cutler led by example and "knew what he wanted."
Cutler's game peaked in his sophomore season.The long-suffering Olivet Comets, who had lost twenty-one games in a row in the late fifties,suddenly went white-hot in the hall of 1961.With Cutler at the helm,the team won its first eight games.Then, in its final game,disaster struck.Midway rolled right,preparing one of his quarterback rushes.He had already scored that season on just such a gambit.This time,he was in the clear,running full tilt along the sideline,right along his team's bench,so close that Coach Parsell could have grabbed him.Then a defender charged toward him, hurling his body in Cutler's way.Cutler tried to jump over him, but the defender smacked him squarely.He crumpled to the ground, his leg broken, his season over.
Cutler tried to return the next season, but on the eve of the opening game a doctor told him he risked permanent injuries if he played on.Cutler reluctantly withdrew.
With the end of his football days, Cutler concentrated on his studies.He excelled in math, dabbled in the sciences but finally decided to pursue engineering.When he graduated in January 1965,he was offered a job programming computers for General Motors.Along with other big companies,GM had begun shifting its business records from paper to computer in the 1950s.But Cutler was not eager to join GM.He knew nothing about computers,which seemed vaguely threatening -- even sinister -- to him. In the mid-1960s,many people shared this dystopian view of computers. These machines,which were designed to crunch numbers, were treated with skepticism and sometimes hostility because they symbolized regimentation.Computers seemed to bend humans to their will, forcing men and women to do little more than tend smart machines.
This gave a bad reputation to computers and the task of writing programs for them.Hardly anyone wished to call himself a programmer,and people who did were considered odd.Just a few years before Cutler graduated from Oliver, the top programmer in the Netherlands, an erstwhile physicist,described himself as a programmer on hi marriage license.To his dismay, authorities rejected the license on the grounds that there was no such job.
Alter to signs of esteem and status,Cutler held a "very stereotyped view of programmers." To a young man, raised in relative penury and intent on making his way up the economic ladder without kowtowing to authority, programming "seemed a very uncre ative job";and those who did it followers of "this fixed bunch of rules," not leaders who called their own plays.
He wanted no parts of software and turned General Motors down flat.Instead he took a post with DuPont.He adapted easily to the conservative and prosperous chemical giant.He kept his hair short and maintained a military bearing.He thought first of earning his keep;he had married a woman he'd me in the college, and had already fathered a child.
DuPont assigned Cutler to a unit that helped customers find uses for its materials. One of his first jobs was to model a new way that Scott Paper intended to make foam insulation for use in jackets and other garments.The model was so complicated that it required a computer to create.Off Cutler went to a school run by IBM, where he learned how to program an IBM computer.
Cutler spent a week at the school.He felt humbled.Programming "was just the most bizarre situation, because you're used to doing something and thinking you've done it right,"he later said."But it isn't right.You just don't notice it isn't right.On a computer there is no consolation in discovering you're almost right.Almost means you're still just wrong."
Even veteran programmers often found their jobs excruciating tedious.In those days, no one had his own computer, of course.Dozens of programmers would share a single mainframe computer. The mainframe,large enough to fill a room,handled many jobs at once in batches.In batch jobs, a programmers punched instructions onto perforated cards, added a stack to the queue and waited for results.Since the mainframe was so expensive,the batch schedule was strict.It often took hours or longer to learn the fate of a program.If it failed, a programmer could spend an entire day just correcting keypunch errors.
Cutler returned to DuPont determined to excel at programming.The activity intrigued him because, in a program, he was master of his environment.He also found he had a rare ability to hold in his mind at once the various and far-flung pieces of a program.He began to crave programming.Impatient with the long lines in DuPont's computer facility, he worked in the middle of the night, when computer time was much cheaper and he could assemble and revise his cards in peace."There was hardly anybody there,"he recalled."I could make twice as many mistakes, and get on and off the computer when I wanted to."
Foam making, by contrast, did not keep Cutler awake at night.In less than a year, he had succumbed to the attraction of computing.Having found in the computer the ideal means to answer a question, he promptly lost interest in the question and fell blindly in love with the tool.Indeed, Cutler had found a calling in life."What I really wanted to do was work on computers,not apply them to problems."
So Cutler,looking for a new job that involved programming, found one with another DuPont division that needed help in maintaining its central computer, which was made by Univac.In the 1950s Univac made the best computers for data processing, but by the late 1960s the company was in decline.DuPont asked Cutler to improve the reliability of its aging Univac,which meant fiddling with the machine's operating system.Until then Cutler had never even thought about operating systems.But the company's
DAVID N.Cutler, wearing white Reeboks, white pants and a T-shirt bearing(to carry something so that it can be seen) the legend OVER THE LINE, bursts into(闯入) the Build Lab and takes the stock of the largest, most complex program ever created for a personal computer.
It is 10:20 in the morning, and the latest "build" of the program, called Window NT, is hours late.Cutler, is the leader of the team making NT, is angry about the delay, angry about a botched test the day before, angry at the world.He knows that nothing slows progress more than a steady accumulation(积累) of small lapses(in easy, comfortable conditions, and enjoying the advantages of being rich 生活优裕；养尊处优
), and he is bent on pushing ahead.
Cutler insists(坚持) on frequent builds, or samples, of NT so that his 250 programmers can "eat their own dog food."It is a frustrating(令人懊恼的) experience, not unlike building a house from scratch(without any previous preparation or knowledge 从头开始；从零开始 ) while living in it.The sooner a build arrives, the sooner his team will test their latest creation, discover its imperfections and improve it.
Scowling, Cutler now slumps into a swivel(旋轴) chair and glares(to look at somebody/something in an angry way ) at the computer screen before him. He hits a few keys and groans(抱怨(声)).
Cutler's unhappiness is contagious(a contagious disease spreads by people touching each other （疾病）接触传染的). Three builders, who stitch together NT with the aid of computers, hover behind Cutler, busying themselves while Cutler churns. One, a shoeless and jittery young man, juggles three rubber balls. He is surrounded by dozens of computers. The voice of Aretha Franklin, romping through "Dr. Feelgood,"fills the room from the stereo speakers mounted on the wall.
No fan of juggling or Aretha, Cutler growls. He jumps to his feet, flinging the chair behind him, and storms out of the lab. The shoeless juggler and the chief builder dip into a big jar of Rolaids, popping one each. The day has soured early.
Minutes later, Cutler returns to the Build Lab even more upset. His bowlegged gait and burly arms remind people of Popeye. "You're wasting the whole goddamn morning not having this goddamn thing ready," he snaps.Then, sounding dejected, he tells the juggler, "Call me if you ever get this [build] out today."
His face reddening even more, Cutler leaves again, steaming.His rough creed forbids his from containing his emotions. "The way you let off stress is to let it out," he says.He isn't too particular about how he does it. A circle drawn on the wall near the door marks the spot where he once unleashed a violent kick, cracking his toe. Just the other day, he smashed a wall with his fist, which ordinarily would not have caused a stir except that this time he hit a stud and broke a finger.
Cutler's impatience is ill mannered but understandable.Time means everything to him now. He is a year behind schedule, and after years of work his team is tired and frustrated. Only the enormity of their goal sustains them now. The 250 members of the team aim to produce a computer program so powerful and versatile that someday everyone will need it. Standing in their way are thousands of bugs, or coding errors, and persistent doubts about the basic design of NT, which stands for "New Technology."
Rather than a single entity, NT consists of scores of intertwined programs that together comprise an operating system. This software turns a personal computer into a precise tool of thought, helping a person or an organization control its most valuable asset: information. NT exerts its power through a dizzying succession of ordinary actions. Seemingly at once, it may open a computer file, move text or graphics from one place to another on a screen, print a letter, calculate a row of numbers and keep several word processors, spreadsheets and other applications from getting in each others' way. NT's most profound benefits are hidden.Its invisible acts sustain a computer much as unconscious acts -- taking a breath, blinking an eye, hearing a sound -- sustain a human life.
NT is alarmingly complex. Consisting of six million lines of code. the program is among humanity's most intricate handiworks."No one mind can comprehend it all," Cutler says.
A system as complicated as NT requires a rich patron. In William H. Gates, NT has one of the richest. Gates is cofounder and chief execute of Microsoft Corp., the word's largest software maker. With NT, Gates seeks to extend his software dominion from desktop software, which he monopolizes, to the network.In the 1980s, Microsoft's DOS and Windows system software defined the way most people worked with computers.In the 1990s, the company aims to define the software that electronically ties together workers and business, consumers and homes. The making of NT, Gates hopes, will be the first step toward realizing this grand dream.
Gates also intends to bring full circle the computer revolution of the past half century. NT marks the latest chapter in the decades-long push to free software from the clutches of hardware. Until now, the structure of a computer determined the shape of its software.If a certain type of computer died, the software died with it. NT puts software at the center of computing, lending programs some universality by letting them take advantage of the best computers available -- and to survive even after their chosen hardware dies.
The making of NT is at once a primer on software, a portrait of a community of programmers and a gritty melodrama about the perilous task of managing complexity in an age of information. As people an machines come to depend wholly and unreservedly on computes for everything from air traffic control to medical diagnostics, good code is crucial to the smooth running of a society.And writing good code is increasingly the work of large teams.Yet such teams often sink into mediocrity because their size alone can breed bureaucracy and sterility. The challenge for every large team is to organize its diverse talents while encouraging leadership and flexibility.
Cutler excels at this balancing act; he is uniquely suited to bring Gates's dream to fruition. A star player and a star coach rolled into one, he sets priorities, writes crucial pieces of code and reviews the work of others. But the price of his leadership is stark. Most of his followers live one-dimensional lives: Work pervades their existence. Friends fade into the background.The tie of marriage fray or rip apart. Children are neglected or deferred. Hobbies wither. Computer code comes to mean everything.If private dreams are nursed at all, it is only to ease the pain of creating NT.
Those who fight against immersion int Cutler's world -- and some stubbornly do -- risk incurring their leader's wrath or, worse, losing his respect. Those who succumb to his will are amply rewarded, earning millions of dollars in Microsoft stock bonuses.Yet even these workers are not exempt from the insecurity of the workplace. The place of technical change and the pressure of competition lend a door-die quality to their jobs. They pour their entire spirit into work because there is no alternative.
Cutler embodies the sobering side of today's workplace.He rejects the distinction between work and leisure, job and family, home and office. The very harshness of his ethic strangely intoxicates his acolytes.He presents a world in which great deeds occur against a bleak backdrop.The enemies are laziness, confusion and incompetence.Each member of team hungers to transcend his own frailties."Our work is really, really hard,"Cutler says."Years from now people on the team are going to look back with pride.They will say,Never before did I accomplish so much or was my life so simple. I didn't have to worry about my career or my happiness or whether I got along with my boss or my friends.I had only one concern -- to ship this product. And to make it as good as I could."
When he first conceived of Windows NT, Cutler only dimply saw the path ahead. Building this most complicated of all PC software programs took him and his loyalists deep into the digital wilderness.For a time, it seemed as if they might never emerge whole from their adventure.Some lost piece of themselves along the way.Others Saw the act of their lives cross the blurry border that marks the known from the unknown.And in the end, they grasped that every worthwhile creation is at once an act of love and an act of violence.
This is their story.
CODE WARRIOR
DAVE Cutler was reared on adversity. He learned at a young age to care for himself, to keep his own counsel, to find a way around or through the obstacles in his path.
He was born on March 13, 1942, in Lansing, the state capital of Michigan.Lansing was auto country, home to a slew of car and car-parts makers.His father, Neil, worked in Lansing's Oldsmobile plant for nearly his entire life, first in the plant's shipping department and then as a janitor.
Neil Cutler was an intelligent and exacting man, but he was quiet an lacked ambition.He had been stricken with rheumatic fever as a boy, and it had left him too frail to play sports. Poor eyesight made it difficult for him to enjoy the outdoors.A certain bitterness crept into him.He was not sociable; he truck some as almost a hermit.At home, he could be unpredictable, angry and gruff.He drank.
Arleta, Neil's wife, raised her son Dave and his older sister,Bonnie, in an apartment above the home of Neil's parents in DeWitt, a town of some one thousand people about eight miles north of Lansing. DeWitt was surrounded by farmland and consisted mainly of retired farmers who had moved off their farms and into the town. When Dave was eight the Cutler moved out of town to a forty-acre spread.The land wasn't suitable for farming and did not contain a dwelling.Neil built a small home, one side of which was literally carved out of the earth. By then Arleta had given birth to two more children. The family seemed to spend all its time together in one large room.Arleta kept a large garden, and the family planted pine trees on the land.In time thousands of trees took root and grew.
From the age of ten David Cutler earned money whenever he could. He mainly worked during the summertime for the many farmers in the area, building barns or doing odd jobs.One summer, he worked in a fertilizer plant. Another year he collected old newspaper with a friend, filling an entire trailer for sale to a recycler.
As a teenager, Cutler was drawn to sports.With a graduating class of thirty-four students,his tiny high school pressed him into service.He ran track and played baseball,basketball and football.He was cocaptain of the basketball team and the quarterback of the football team.In one game,he ran for two touchdowns, running almost the entire length of the field for one score.He was very fast.
The local newspaper treated Cutler as a star, chronicling his exploits.Neil skipped nearly all of his son's games; it took a personal invitation from the football coach for him even to consider attending the one game during his son's senior year in which every player's father was introduced. Neil (who went) said hi disliked sports, but Arleta suspected that jealousy had kept her husband from the sidelines.
Father and son were distant.While still in high school, Cutler moved out of his parents' home for a time, living first with the family of a baseball coach and then with Bonnie.At school, meanwhile, Cutler did well enough without studying hard. Graduating in June 1960,Cutler seemed serene about his prospects.Somewhere inside him sprang a confidence bordering on arrogance and a belief that he could be the best at anything he tackled.Others shared Cutler's buoyant sense of himself.In his high school yearbook,classmates captured his specialness in a line beneath his photograph:
"None but himself could be his parallel."
A small Michigan college called Oliver cobbled together several athletic and academic scholarships, offering them as a package to Cutler. He signed on.His freshman year, he started at quarterback,calling and directing his own plays just like a pro.He threw the ball well and ran one hundred yards fast -- in less than eleven seconds. He was about five feet nine inches tall,weighed about 175 pounds and had thick, strong legs.His coach, Stu Parsell, called his "a one-in-a-million player" and marveled at his elusiveness. Cutler was a wily player who confessed he "loved to run over people."
In the huddle,Cutler smartly dished out assignment in between plays.He brooked no dissent,berating teammates for their lapses and telling them:"This huddle is my territory When you're in it, shut up."When players"screwed up,"he said,"I'd really ride them,telling them what to do...to get out there and do their job."
Coach Parsell realized that Cutler relied on more than athletic skills."He was smart enough to know he couldn't win alone,"Parsell said."He brought the other players up with him.They rose to him."The team responded to his brash assertions because Cutler led by example and "knew what he wanted."
Cutler's game peaked in his sophomore season.The long-suffering Olivet Comets, who had lost twenty-one games in a row in the late fifties,suddenly went white-hot in the hall of 1961.With Cutler at the helm,the team won its first eight games.Then, in its final game,disaster struck.Midway rolled right,preparing one of his quarterback rushes.He had already scored that season on just such a gambit.This time,he was in the clear,running full tilt along the sideline,right along his team's bench,so close that Coach Parsell could have grabbed him.Then a defender charged toward him, hurling his body in Cutler's way.Cutler tried to jump over him, but the defender smacked him squarely.He crumpled to the ground, his leg broken, his season over.
Cutler tried to return the next season, but on the eve of the opening game a doctor told him he risked permanent injuries if he played on.Cutler reluctantly withdrew.
With the end of his football days, Cutler concentrated on his studies.He excelled in math, dabbled in the sciences but finally decided to pursue engineering.When he graduated in January 1965,he was offered a job programming computers for General Motors.Along with other big companies,GM had begun shifting its business records from paper to computer in the 1950s.But Cutler was not eager to join GM.He knew nothing about computers,which seemed vaguely threatening -- even sinister -- to him. In the mid-1960s,many people shared this dystopian view of computers. These machines,which were designed to crunch numbers, were treated with skepticism and sometimes hostility because they symbolized regimentation.Computers seemed to bend humans to their will, forcing men and women to do little more than tend smart machines.
This gave a bad reputation to computers and the task of writing programs for them.Hardly anyone wished to call himself a programmer,and people who did were considered odd.Just a few years before Cutler graduated from Oliver, the top programmer in the Netherlands, an erstwhile physicist,described himself as a programmer on hi marriage license.To his dismay, authorities rejected the license on the grounds that there was no such job.
Alter to signs of esteem and status,Cutler held a "very stereotyped view of programmers." To a young man, raised in relative penury and intent on making his way up the economic ladder without kowtowing to authority, programming "seemed a very uncre ative job";and those who did it followers of "this fixed bunch of rules," not leaders who called their own plays.
He wanted no parts of software and turned General Motors down flat.Instead he took a post with DuPont.He adapted easily to the conservative and prosperous chemical giant.He kept his hair short and maintained a military bearing.He thought first of earning his keep;he had married a woman he'd me in the college, and had already fathered a child.
DuPont assigned Cutler to a unit that helped customers find uses for its materials. One of his first jobs was to model a new way that Scott Paper intended to make foam insulation for use in jackets and other garments.The model was so complicated that it required a computer to create.Off Cutler went to a school run by IBM, where he learned how to program an IBM computer.
Cutler spent a week at the school.He felt humbled.Programming "was just the most bizarre situation, because you're used to doing something and thinking you've done it right,"he later said."But it isn't right.You just don't notice it isn't right.On a computer there is no consolation in discovering you're almost right.Almost means you're still just wrong."
Even veteran programmers often found their jobs excruciating tedious.In those days, no one had his own computer, of course.Dozens of programmers would share a single mainframe computer. The mainframe,large enough to fill a room,handled many jobs at once in batches.In batch jobs, a programmers punched instructions onto perforated cards, added a stack to the queue and waited for results.Since the mainframe was so expensive,the batch schedule was strict.It often took hours or longer to learn the fate of a program.If it failed, a programmer could spend an entire day just correcting keypunch errors.
Cutler returned to DuPont determined to excel at programming.The activity intrigued him because, in a program, he was master of his environment.He also found he had a rare ability to hold in his mind at once the various and far-flung pieces of a program.He began to crave programming.Impatient with the long lines in DuPont's computer facility, he worked in the middle of the night, when computer time was much cheaper and he could assemble and revise his cards in peace."There was hardly anybody there,"he recalled."I could make twice as many mistakes, and get on and off the computer when I wanted to."
Foam making, by contrast, did not keep Cutler awake at night.In less than a year, he had succumbed to the attraction of computing.Having found in the computer the ideal means to answer a question, he promptly lost interest in the question and fell blindly in love with the tool.Indeed, Cutler had found a calling in life."What I really wanted to do was work on computers,not apply them to problems."
So Cutler,looking for a new job that involved programming, found one with another DuPont division that needed help in maintaining its central computer, which was made by Univac.In the 1950s Univac made the best computers for data processing, but by the late 1960s the company was in decline.DuPont asked Cutler to improve the reliability of its aging Univac,which meant fiddling with the machine's operating system.Until then Cutler had never even thought about operating systems.But the company's