Geeks How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho
By JON KATZ
EXCERPT
Jesse and Eric lived in a cave-an airless two-bedroom apartment in a dank stucco-and-brick
complex on the outskirts of Caldwell. Two doors down, chickens paraded around the street.
The apartment itself was dominated by two computers that sat across from the front door like
twin shrines. Everything else-the piles of dirty laundry, the opened Doritos bags, the empty cans
of generic soda pop, two ratty old chairs, and a moldering beanbag chair-was dispensable, an
afterthought, props.
Jesse's computer was a Pentium 11 300, Asus P2B (Intel BX chipset) motherboard; a Matrix
Milleniurn II AGP; 160 MB SDRAM with a 15.5 GB total hard-drive space; a 4X CD-recorder;
24X CD-ROM; a 17-inch Micron monitor. Plus a scanner and printer. A well-thumbed
paperback-Katherine Dunn's novel Geek Love-served as his mousepad.
Eric's computer: an AMD K-6 233 with a generic motherboard; an S3 video card, a 15-inch
monitor; a 2.5 GB hard drive with 36 MB SDRAM. Jesse wangled the parts for both from work.
They stashed their bikes and then Jesse blasted in through the door, which was always left open
since he can never hang on to keys, and went right to his PC, which was always on. He yelled a
question to Eric about the new operating system. "We change them like cartons of milk," he
explained. At the moment, he had NT 5, NT 4, Work Station, Windows 98, and he and Eric had
begun fooling around with Linux, the complex, open-source software system rapidly spreading
across the world.
Before settling in at his own rig, Eric grabbed a swig of milk from a carton in the refrigerator,
taking a good whiff first. Meals usually consisted of a daily fast-food stop at lunchtime;
everything else was more or less on the fly. There didn't seem to be any edible food in the
refrigerator, apart from a slightly discolored hunk of cheddar cheese.
Jesse opened his MP3 playlist (MP3 is a wildly popular format for storing music on computer
hard drives; on the Net, songs get traded like baseball cards) and pulled down five or six tracks-
Alanis Morissette, John Lee Hooker, Eric Clapton, Ani DiFranco. He turned on his Web
browser, checked his e-mail, opened ICQ chat (an also-rapidly growing global messaging and
chat system) looking for messages from Sam Hunter, fellow Geek Club alumnus, or his mother
or sisters.
He and Eric networked their computers for a few quick rounds of Quake 11. Racing down
hallways and passages on the screen, picking up ammo and medical supplies, acquiring ever
bigger guns and Wasters, the two kept up their techno-patter about the graphics, speed, and
performance of their computers. "My hard drive is grungy," Eric complained. Jesse gunned Eric
down three times in a row, then yelped, "Shit, I'm dead." A laser burst of bullets splattered blood
all over the dungeonlike floor.
Meanwhile, the two of them continued to chat with me over their shoulders, pausing every now
and then to kill or be killed. All the while, Jesse listened to music, and answered ICQ messages.
Somebody called and asked about ordering an ID card, the cottage industry that at fifty bucks a
pop will help underwrite their contemplated move to Chicago. Somebody e-mailed a few
additional MP3s; somebody else sent software and upgrades for Quake and Doom. I was dizzied
and distracted by all the activity; they were completely in their element.
The game was still under way when Eric moved over to the scanner and printer and printed out
something semi-official-looking.
"Too dark," was Jesse's assessment, without seeming to look away from the screen. So Eric went
back to his computer and called up a graphic program. Jesse took another phone call, still playing
Quake, as Joni Mitchell gave way to Jane's Addiction, then the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
At any given point, he was doing six things almost simultaneously, sipping soda, glancing at the
phone's caller ID, watching the scanner and the printer, blasting away at menacing soldiers,
opening mail from an apartment manager in Chicago, fielding a message from his sister in Boise.
He wasn't just a kid at a computer, but something more, something new, an impresario and an
Information Age CEO, transfixed and concentrated, almost part of the machinery, conducting the
digital ensemble that controlled his life. Anyone could have come into the apartment and carted
away everything in it, except for the computer, and Jesse wouldn't have noticed or perhaps cared
that much. He was playing, working, networking, visiting, strategizing-all without skipping a
function, getting confused, or stopping to think.
It was evidently second nature by now, which explained why he looked as if he hadn't been out
in the sun for years. It was more or less true: A couple of weeks earlier, he'd gone hiking along
the Idaho River on a bright day and landed in the hospital emergency room with his arms and
legs severely sunburned.
He carried himself like someone who expected to get screwed, who would have to fend for
himself when that happened, and who was almost never surprised when it did. Trouble, Jesse
often declared, was the building block of character. Without the former, you didn't get the latter.