I was young, and needed the money. A week-long contract in San Francisco, to do some contract work. Instead of a vacation.
Well, so I flew to the Embarcadero center, some late fall.
The task was to work on some audio code, and maybe networking, for a popular multiplayer cyber- tank battle game.
It was a great gig. I onboarded with another dev, who sat with me for the first 30 minutes after a few rounds, while we watched dark shapes out in the bay and tried to determine if they were submarines or whales.
Then, when it got dark, we decided to stop testing and do some work, looking out over the bay as our machines rebooted into developer modes.
After our sprint and midnight pizza, the boss came in, introduced himself, and asked me a question that kinda changed my life: “have you read Snow Crash yet?” .. it had just been released, I hadn’t gotten there yet.
“No, I brought the new 2600 with me though, you wanna .. “ .. “Stop”, he said. Walks to his office, digs through a box, gives me a brand new, fresh copy, first edition. Because of course he had a box of them.
“Don’t work on anything else until you’ve read this cover to cover”, was the directive.
“Really”, yes really ..
My onboarding colleague looked at me with an amused smirk, shrugged, and said “yeah, you gotta ..”
So I spent 3 work days and a weekend, reading it.
Get to Monday, I’m good to go. I’ll make this audio code listen to reason.
37th floor, Embarcadero like I said, I get out of the lift and .. there’s a dark mood in the room. DOOM had just hit.
Well, I’ve been living Snow Crash since the day I read it, is all I’m saying.
Can confirm, it's very much Hiro Protagonist. I love the style, and the over-the-topness of it all made more sense once I learned that it was originally planned as a graphic novel, IIRC.
Gibson's style is much more post-modern. I read Neuromancer right after Gravity's Rainbow and expected some reprieve from dense prose, but it was almost the same difficulty level, especially for a non-native reader.
edit: Adding my favorite Snow Crash quote:
> When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
Hah. I forgot about that promo. That must have been the second version of Spectre (VR) or a console, I don’t remember having consultants when we worked on the first one, and we hadn’t connected with Moses Ma (whose offices those were) during the first one.
Yes it was Spectre VR, I slipped in with Michael Lyons and did some work alongside him on the AWE32 integration, which was brand new then and part of another promotion, and then we did some network things and fixed the BBS a few times. ;)
Moses was a riot, very exuberant.
It was an honor to have anything at all to do with Spectre, I was a pretty big fan of it .. until DOOM hit. ;)
A couple days later, I'd read the book and could get back to the code. So after we got a few things plugged in upstairs my onboarding co-developer buddy decides the next task is to show me around town. Our eyes need a break from the smashed pixels, and I sure can't look at or listen to any more broken audio code for the time being.
In the lobby of the Embarcadero, SGI had a CAVE set up for demo's.
We spent a couple of minutes lustfully sniffing at it .. expensive hardware we games programmers were convinced we'd have in our own cubicles, some day. "No .. some day, everyone will have a graphics engine like an SGI .. in their pockets", we chortle, not really serious. The demo was cute, a blocky seagull flying through gullies and over gourad-shaded hills and things. Fantastic. Then, as now, I couldn't last more than a few minutes with the headset on until the horizon parallax disorder takes its toll. I look as I type this now, over at my museum shelf full of SGI gear .. an Indy, an O2, an Octane2 .. and I'm typing all this as my already-outdated GPU's scream in the background so I don't have to write a line of code ever again. I miss SGI.
We head down to the wharf to watch late night tourists and see about some food. I'm not really digging the clam chowder, Mr. Onboard finds some fish and chips he'd rather feed to the sea lions.
I note that the little "record your own pop song" booth business that I'd seen teenage girls belting out their hits, some 5 years previously when I'd visited San Fran as a teenager myself at a shinier age .. is now a run-down shanty. Bums everywhere - that was normal for San Francisco of course - but the gloss and shine of the 80's that I'd remembered from my previous visit had all gone, the wind didn't smell like toasty sugar much any more, as it once had. Piss and vinegar, maybe. Maybe the bums were friendlier, then. Cleaner, somehow. The bay wind was still cold as fuck.
We bounce around downtown SF a bit, deciding to walk until we work out something else to do. "Maybe catch a show at a theatre I know", he chuckles to himself. I have no idea what he could mean, it's too late for that now surely, and besides we are miles from any kind of entertainment. Cable cars and tourists and stressed out businessmen. Punks spitting at old people. Seagulls, incongruous, chasing at paper. A cold wind sometimes interrupted by a blast from skyscraper doors, opening and closing like some breathing coral cell, replenishing the neighborhood with warm CO2, heavy in the tubes.
We make it to the theatre Mr. Onboard had been babbling about, and I find out who the Mitchell brothers were and what, finally, was behind the green door. Suddenly that contractor rate didn't seem so great.
Afterwards, we stumble towards his place in a hip spot of town, where I'll crash out on his couch, just across the road from a ghetto slum or two. We'd be safe, he says, if we don't cross the road.
The steep hills hurt my ankles, and I'm getting tired of not knowing where the horizon is. Los Angeles doesn't have that problem, I note. He doesn't care, there's nothing cool happening in LA, all the action is in San Fran. He's kinda right, but I knew some things, even then.
He deals with the ritual of getting into the place - 5 locks, 5 different keys - and we settle in for .. 5 hours of sleep .. before we need to be back at Embarcadero, first thing, for the company standup. I note his apartment, a 3-bedroom place for which he's paying a nearly 5-figure rent, is very clearly occupied by zoo animals.
Pizza and keyboards, half-finished PC's with their guts strewn over the coffee table, trendy programming books and socks everywhere, an SH101 synthesizer leaning on the grubby window, 3 different varieties of Ivy League hoodies, Princeton and two others, and so much other interesting detritus and paraphernalia not relevant to the situation, which is that we are two wired-up coders, desperate for sleep.
I make a big mistake, and half-assedly press the power button on the disembowled PC, just for grins. I only wanted to see if it booted, not expecting it to. He laughs, "okay then.." disappears into his room and I see the sudden grey glow, hear the chime I'd been optimizing buffers and I/O handlers for all day, and off we go, some more pixels to smash, "one more quick round" endlessly until the sun starts to come up through that grubby window. I'll never forget the SH101 silhouette, broken by sunrise, burned into my retina, immutable.
We take a taxi back to the office, sleepless, and my new onboarder friend/colleague loads up a tub of coffee, heads back to his cubicle. "See you at lunch", he says, but when I go to get him at lunch-time, he's fast asleep under his desk, and I don't have the energy to wake him, so I trudge out to find the one subway shop in the Embarcadero, whose jalapeño subs I can also still taste in my mind.
Good times. Halcyon days. We had a tally of 12 submarines and 8 whales, that week.
Well, so I flew to the Embarcadero center, some late fall.
The task was to work on some audio code, and maybe networking, for a popular multiplayer cyber- tank battle game.
It was a great gig. I onboarded with another dev, who sat with me for the first 30 minutes after a few rounds, while we watched dark shapes out in the bay and tried to determine if they were submarines or whales.
Then, when it got dark, we decided to stop testing and do some work, looking out over the bay as our machines rebooted into developer modes.
After our sprint and midnight pizza, the boss came in, introduced himself, and asked me a question that kinda changed my life: “have you read Snow Crash yet?” .. it had just been released, I hadn’t gotten there yet.
“No, I brought the new 2600 with me though, you wanna .. “ .. “Stop”, he said. Walks to his office, digs through a box, gives me a brand new, fresh copy, first edition. Because of course he had a box of them.
“Don’t work on anything else until you’ve read this cover to cover”, was the directive.
“Really”, yes really ..
My onboarding colleague looked at me with an amused smirk, shrugged, and said “yeah, you gotta ..”
So I spent 3 work days and a weekend, reading it.
Get to Monday, I’m good to go. I’ll make this audio code listen to reason.
37th floor, Embarcadero like I said, I get out of the lift and .. there’s a dark mood in the room. DOOM had just hit.
Well, I’ve been living Snow Crash since the day I read it, is all I’m saying.