10 of 15

by John Graham

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You must fit your child for life: educate them beyond the level that you achieved and raise them in good health and in an ethic of decency and respect for others. My first two children turned out well.

Let me tell you about my son, Pail.

Having a brilliant son is not all it might be made out to be.

Paul was brought to this country when he was three and a half and when people asked his name he would answer "Master Paul" as a true English child should. It would have taken him years to be assimilated into American culture but he never really has been.

In school he was a pain from nursery school onwards each September we would be called to school to take him away. He was too obstreperous, too free-willed, and too difficult to confine in a culture that said children should not be confined. Only by giving him additional private work to do in school did we get peace.

Before he graduated from high school the head master called us to explain why they were thinking of expelling him for insolence to the librarian and for running a magazine that was felt to be inappropriate in the school. Paul felt that we, the parents, should sue the school and to help he brought home case law for our lawyers.

I rejected lawyers but after negotiations, Paul graduated one of the only two in the school to receive a major national scholarship. The other winner was his collaborator on the magazine. It was called "dot txt." In 1983 we knew nothing of desktop computers or what electronic files were called but these boys that the school couldn't handle did.

Paul persuaded me to buy a desktop computer, a TRS-80 (trash 80) from Radio Shack. The rules that I established were no difficulty for him: there were to be no commercial games, so he wrote his own. It was a ski slalom that got increasingly difficult as you mastered each run. For fun he wrote an Arabic word-processor, designing the fonts and wrapping text the opposite way to our Western script.

(As an aside. I wrote and sold software for the Trash 80 that paid for the machine and more.)
In college, Cornell, Paul was no less of a pain. In the same week that we received a letter announcing that he had made the Dean's list we received another letter billing us for a door that he had burned down in the dorm.
Nevertheless, he graduated summa cum laude and moved to Harvard.

Within a year I received a call from Paul asking whether I would stand behind his lawyers' fees. I said, instantly, "No," and then asked what it was all about. Paul said that he had been called before a Grand Jury. It appeared that his friend, Robert Morris, who is now famous in computer literature, had overcome his father's responsibility for protection of the Government's Darpa-net. Unfortunately, his software had got out of control and spread throughout the system the first virus. It clogged the government system as far as Australia and Europe. The Government was now out to get him.

There were no repercussions for Paul although Robert had to serve a felony sentence. He wrote software for the State of Tennessee. Our most backward state got lucky.

When Paul graduated from Harvard with a good doctorate, he announced that he was not interested in computer science. "Been there, done that," was his philosophy, so while I was waiting for him to join an engineering corporation at $150,000 per annum, he took off for Art Academy in Florence in debt.
There he described his room as 15 feet long and four feet wide with lots of doors a corridor I thought but he did share the apartment with two Italian girls so his language improved.

Then he returned to the States to join the Rhode Island School of Design the US equivalent of the Royal Slade School of Arts in Britain. He qualified in a year and then moved to the New York to be with other artists. We were not speaking, of course, because he had no health or accident insurance and he refused mine.
Then we heard that he had formed a company with four Harvard computer specialists, including the infamous and expert Robert Morris, and four Rhode Island School of Design designers. They had created a shopping site based on captive software. Its clients shortly included Amnesty International, the Boston Marathon, the Vermont Teddy Bear Company, Dean and De Lucia, the Houston Oilers, Victoria's Secret, and nine hundred more.

In just less than three years they had sold the shopping site to Yahoo for $80 million in stock. That stock doubled three times (that's $640 million folks) before the stock crashed. Fortunately, Paul and his friends were into real estate with their shares before that.

After two years of transferring and enhancing their site for Yahoo, Paul retired at 35. He now says that he doesn't think of the price of anything. He didn't buy the new Rolls because he thought it looked like a tank and anyway he didn't have a garage in Cambridge. Instead he still drives his yellow Golf. When you have money you don't need to conform.

Not that he ever did of course.

Now, at 39, he lectures on computing and the computer language, Lisp, in which he is an authority. He writes articles and books (three so far, increasingly in philosophy rather than pure science); he flies small planes for enjoyment and generally does what he wants to do. He is also well known in computing circles as the originator of anti-spam software.

On a personal note, he and I had not spoken for eight years except for a few monosyllabic e-mails until recently. The reason was his mother and my divorce. Now however, he has met my new wife for a few hours and time seems to be healing.

The pain is gone.

Learn more about this author, John Graham.

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