The Hacker Crackdown Part 49

Inside the office, Kapor excuses himself briefly to do a little mouse-whizzing housekeeping on his personal Macintosh IIfx.

If its giant screen were an open window, an agile person could climb through it without much trouble at all.

There's a coffee-cup at Kapor's elbow, a memento of his recent trip to Eastern Europe, which has a black-and-white stencilled photo and the legend CAPITALIST FOOLS TOUR.

It's Kapor, Barlow, and two California venture-capitalist luminaries of their acquaintance, four windblown, grinning Baby Boomer dudes in leather jackets, boots, denim, travel bags, standing on airport tarmac somewhere behind the formerly Iron Curtain.

They look as if they're having the absolute time of their lives.

Kapor is in a reminiscent mood. We talk a bit about his youth-- high school days as a "math nerd," Sat.u.r.days attending Columbia University's high-school science honors program, where he had his first experience programming computers. IBM 1620s, in 1965 and '66. "I was very interested,"

says Kapor, "and then I went off to college and got distracted by drugs s.e.x and rock and roll, like anybody with half a brain would have then!"

After college he was a progressive-rock DJ in Hartford, Connecticut, for a couple of years.

I ask him if he ever misses his rock and roll days--if he ever wished he could go back to radio work.

He shakes his head flatly. "I stopped thinking about going back to be a DJ the day after Altamont."

Kapor moved to Boston in 1974 and got a job programming mainframes in COBOL.

He hated it. He quit and became a teacher of transcendental meditation.

(It was Kapor's long flirtation with Eastern mysticism that gave the world "Lotus.")

In 1976 Kapor went to Switzerland, where the Transcendental Meditation movement had rented a gigantic Victorian hotel in St-Moritz. It was an all-male group--a hundred and twenty of them--determined upon Enlightenment or Bust. Kapor had given the transcendant his best shot.

He was becoming disenchanted by "the nuttiness in the organization."

"They were teaching people to levitate," he says, staring at the floor.

His voice drops an octave, becomes flat. "THEY DON'T LEVITATE."

Kapor chose Bust. He went back to the States and acquired a degree in counselling psychology. He worked a while in a hospital, couldn't stand that either. "My rep was," he says "a very bright kid with a lot of potential who hasn't found himself. Almost thirty.

Sort of lost."

Kapor was unemployed when he bought his first personal computer--an Apple II.

He sold his stereo to raise cash and drove to New Hamps.h.i.+re to avoid the sales tax.

"The day after I purchased it," Kapor tells me, "I was hanging out in a computer store and I saw another guy, a man in his forties, well-dressed guy, and eavesdropped on his conversation with the salesman.

He didn't know anything about computers. I'd had a year programming.

And I could program in BASIC. I'd taught myself. So I went up to him, and I actually sold myself to him as a consultant." He pauses.

"I don't know where I got the nerve to do this. It was uncharacteristic.

I just said, 'I think I can help you, I've been listening, this is what you need to do and I think I can do it for you.'

And he took me on! He was my first client! I became a computer consultant the first day after I bought the Apple II."

Kapor had found his true vocation. He attracted more clients for his consultant service, and started an Apple users' group.

A friend of Kapor's, Eric Rosenfeld, a graduate student at MIT, had a problem. He was doing a thesis on an arcane form of financial statistics, but could not wedge himself into the crowded queue for time on MIT's mainframes. (One might note at this point that if Mr. Rosenfeld had dishonestly broken into the MIT mainframes, Kapor himself might have never invented Lotus 1-2-3 and the PC business might have been set back for years!) Eric Rosenfeld did have an Apple II, however, and he thought it might be possible to scale the problem down.

Kapor, as favor, wrote a program for him in BASIC that did the job.

It then occurred to the two of them, out of the blue, that it might be possible to SELL this program.

They marketed it themselves, in plastic baggies, for about a hundred bucks a pop, mail order.

"This was a total cottage industry by a marginal consultant,"

Kapor says proudly. "That's how I got started, honest to G.o.d."

Rosenfeld, who later became a very prominent figure on Wall Street, urged Kapor to go to MIT's business school for an MBA.

Kapor did seven months there, but never got his MBA.

He picked up some useful tools--mainly a firm grasp of the principles of accounting--and, in his own words, "learned to talk MBA." Then he dropped out and went to Silicon Valley.

The inventors of VisiCalc, the Apple computer's premier business program, had shown an interest in Mitch Kapor. Kapor worked diligently for them for six months, got tired of California, and went back to Boston where they had better bookstores. The VisiCalc group had made the critical error of bringing in "professional management."

"That drove them into the ground," Kapor says.

"Yeah, you don't hear a lot about VisiCalc these days," I muse.

Kapor looks surprised. "Well, Lotus. . . we BOUGHT it."

"Oh. You BOUGHT it?"

"Yeah."

"Sort of like the Bell System buying Western Union?"

Kapor grins. "Yep! Yep! Yeah, exactly!"

Mitch Kapor was not in full command of the destiny of himself or his industry. The hottest software commodities of the early 1980s were COMPUTER GAMES--the Atari seemed destined to enter every teenage home in America. Kapor got into business software simply because he didn't have any particular feeling for computer games. But he was supremely fast on his feet, open to new ideas and inclined to trust his instincts.

And his instincts were good. He chose good people to deal with-- gifted programmer Jonathan Sachs (the co-author of Lotus 1-2-3).

Financial wizard Eric Rosenfeld, canny Wall Street a.n.a.lyst and venture capitalist Ben Rosen. Kapor was the founder and CEO of Lotus, one of the most spectacularly successful business ventures of the later twentieth century.

He is now an extremely wealthy man. I ask him if he actually knows how much money he has.

"Yeah," he says. "Within a percent or two."

How much does he actually have, then?

He shakes his head. "A lot. A lot. Not something I talk about.

Issues of money and cla.s.s are things that cut pretty close to the bone."

I don't pry. It's beside the point. One might presume, impolitely, that Kapor has at least forty million--that's what he got the year he left Lotus. People who ought to know claim Kapor has about a hundred and fifty million, give or take a market swing in his stock holdings. If Kapor had stuck with Lotus, as his colleague friend and rival Bill Gates has stuck with his own software start-up, Microsoft, then Kapor would likely have much the same fortune Gates has-- somewhere in the neighborhood of three billion, give or take a few hundred million. Mitch Kapor has all the money he wants. Money has lost whatever charm it ever held for him--probably not much in the first place.

When Lotus became too uptight, too bureaucratic, too far from the true sources of his own satisfaction, Kapor walked.

He simply severed all connections with the company and went out the door.

It stunned everyone--except those who knew him best.

Kapor has not had to strain his resources to wreak a thorough transformation in cybers.p.a.ce politics. In its first year, EFF's budget was about a quarter of a million dollars.

Kapor is running EFF out of his pocket change.

Kapor takes pains to tell me that he does not consider himself a civil libertarian per se. He has spent quite some time with true-blue civil libertarians lately, and there's a political-correctness to them that bugs him. They seem to him to spend entirely too much time in legal nitpicking and not enough vigorously exercising civil rights in the everyday real world.

Kapor is an entrepreneur. Like all hackers, he prefers his involvements direct, personal, and hands-on. "The fact that EFF has a node on the Internet is a great thing. We're a publisher. We're a distributor of information." Among the items the eff.org Internet node carries is back issues of Phrack. They had an internal debate about that in EFF, and finally decided to take the plunge. They might carry other digital underground publications--but if they do, he says, "we'll certainly carry Donn Parker, and anything Gail Thackeray wants to put up. We'll turn it into a public library, that has the whole spectrum of use. Evolve in the direction of people making up their own minds." He grins. "We'll try to label all the editorials."

Kapor is determined to tackle the technicalities of the Internet in the service of the public interest. "The problem with being a node on the Net today is that you've got to have a captive technical specialist.

We have Chris Davis around, for the care and feeding of the balky beast!

We couldn't do it ourselves!"

He pauses. "So one direction in which technology has to evolve is much more standardized units, that a non-technical person can feel comfortable with. It's the same s.h.i.+ft as from minicomputers to PCs.

I can see a future in which any person can have a Node on the Net.

Any person can be a publisher. It's better than the media we now have.

It's possible. We're working actively."