Go to: The Story of the Math Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers, Chess Wizards, Maverick Scientists, and Iconoclasts, the Programmers Who Created the Software Revolution
Book by Steve Lohr; Basic Books, 2001

Introduction: The Rise of Software and the Programming Art
A LONE SAILBOAT IN THE DISTANCE makes its way across the rippled surface of Lake Washington in the crisp autumn dusk, framed on the horizon by the skyline of Seattle. The view is from the lakeside home of Charles Simonyi, who was a 17-year-old computer programming prodigy when he left Budapest for good in 1966. Since then, he has come a remarkable distance, in every sense. His house, though all but invisible from the road, sweeps down the hillside toward the water's edge, covers more than 20,000 square feet and includes a library, computer lab, fitness center, and swimming pool. Made of glass, wood, and steel, the home is a work of high modernism, outside and in. The black floors ofpolished stone glisten, and visitors are asked to remove their shoes. The walls are bare except for works of modern art by Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, and Victor Vasarely. Besides art, Simonyi collects jets. He has two, including a retired NATO fighter, which he flies. His multimillion-dollar philanthropic donations have placed his name on an endowed chair at Oxford University and on the mathematics building at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Simonyi fled Hungary as a teenager with nothing, but he now regards money with the nonchalance of the billionaire he has become. "I have no mercenary reasons for things anymore," he said.

Simonyi owes it all to software, and his uncanny facility with computer code- aided, of course, by good timing, good luck, and the whimsy of capitalism. His career began at Hungary's Central Statistical Office in the mid-1960s, where he was a kind of communist version of an American teenage computer hacker. He hung around, made himself useful, and taught himself how to program on a Russian-made Ural II. In computing time, the Budapest center was living in the early 1950s, generations behind the West. Over the years, advances in software have allowed programmers to lift their gaze up further and further from the level of binary digits, or bits - the 1's and 0's that are the natural vernacular of the machine. But Simonyi learned to talk to the computer almost entirely on the machine's terms. "It was Stone Age programming," he recalled. "I've been through a time warp."

After immigrating to the United States, Simonyi changed his name from Karoly to Charles. He attended the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University, and later joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Simonyi was at Xerox PARC during the glory years of the 1970s, when the team there did so much of the research and development that has shaped how people use personal computers. At Xerox PARC, Simonyi was the principal developer of Bravo, an innovative program for writing and editing text that allowed a person to display words on a computer screen as if plucked from the imagination of a skilled typesetter. It was a capability that became known as WYSIWYG - "What You See Is What You Get" - and it opened the door to the desktop publishing industry, and helped define the personal computer as a tool for enhancing individual creativity.

When it became clear that Xerox did not really grasp the significance of the work of its Palo Alto lab, Simonyi looked for work elsewhere. In the summer of 1980, he made an unannounced call, on a little company outside Seattle trying to make its way in the fledgling personal computer industry - Microsoft. The startup had only 40 employees, but Simonyi sniffed the future there. He and Bill Gates hit it off immediately, and Simonyi went to Microsoft.

Microsoft's Word text editor is one of the most widely used software programs in the world, and Simonyi is the "father of Word," the commercial descendant of Bravo. To him, the personal computer is a kind of delivery vehicle for software, empowering users and magnifying the power of the programmer. "You write a few lines of code and suddenly life is better for a hundred million people," he said. "That's software." For the last several years, Simonyi has been working on an ambitious research project with the goal of greatly improving the productivity of computer programmers. He believes that the tools and methods programmers use are still fairly crude, limiting the amount of human intelligence that can be transmitted in software and thus slowing progress. Despite the constraints, Simonyi cannot help but marvel at the rise of software during his lifetime. "It shows how powerful software is. Even with the primitive tools we still use, look at how much software can do. It's amazing."

The ascent of software in the postwar years - as a field of endeavor, as an industry and as a medium of communication and commerce - has been rapid, remarkable, and almost surreptitious. The ancestry of what we now call computer programming goes back at least to the nineteenth century, when the English mathematician Charles Babbage struggled with how to handle calculations in his Analytical Engine, a conceptual forerunner of the modern computer. What he was trying to do we would now call programming. The most fundamental concept in programming is the algorithm - simply put, a set of instructions for doing something, a recipe for calculation. The algorithm apparently traces its roots to the Babylonians, and the word is a distortion of al- Khwarizmi, the family name of a Persian scholar, Muhammad ibn Musa al- Khwarizmi, who wrote a treatise on algebraic methods.

Yet it was not until World War II that electronics had advanced to the point that building useful computers became a real possibility. In those early days, programming was an afterthought. It was considered more a technician's chore, usually referred to as "setting up" or "coding" the machine. The glamour was all in the hardware - that was deemed real science and engineering. The ENIAC, for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, was the machine generally credited with starting the era of digital electronic computing. That computer, at the University of Pennsylvania, did not have software. Its handlers had to set up the machine by hand, plugging and unplugging a maze of wires and properly positioning row upon row of switches. It was as if the machine had to be rebuilt for each new problem. It was hard-wired programming. To do it, the government hired a handful of young women with math skills as trainees. These early women programmers were known, literally, as "computers," a throwback to the eighteenth century use of the term to refer to the human computers who prepared statistical tables used in map-making and ocean navigation.