opened. They looked as new as everything else in the room. Clark had no idea what was in them (“It must just be some boring old stuff,” he said), but he did not mind if I opened them.
At the top of the first box there was a yellowing clipping from the local newspaper in Plainview, Texas, where Clark grew up. The paper wanted to let the townspeople know that one of their own had gone to California and created a big company called Silicon Graphics. It played it as a straightforward local-boy-makes-good story, and made light of Clark’s boyhood failure. It mentioned that he’d been expelled from the local public high school in his junior year. He’d been an indifferent student and a cutup—one of those great bad examples to youth who prove that if you really want to be a success in American life you have to start by offending your elders. The offense that got Clark tossed out for good was telling an English teacher to “go to hell.” Before that he had exploded a small bomb on a school bus, smuggled a skunk, inside a horn case, into a school dance, and set off a string of firecrackers inside another student’s locker, among other tricks. Once he left school—or school left him—he fled town.
The next clue folded neatly inside the cardboard boxes was a photograph of Clark circa 1970, having just received his master’s degree in physics from the University of New Orleans, on his way to a Ph.D. program at the University of Utah. He wore thick dark-rimmed glasses, a crew cut, and an expression that approached, but did not quite achieve, innocence. In under eight years this person, considered unfit to graduate from public high school in Plainview, Texas, had earned himself a Ph.D. in Computer Science.
Actually, the story was more remarkable than that. His father abandoned the family when Clark was a small child. His mother should have taken welfare, but it never occurred to her. The home Clark went back to after a day of turning his school on its head was situated somewhere below the poverty line. When I asked him about the article in the Plainview paper, all he said was “I grew up in black and white. I thought the whole world was shit and I was sitting in the middle of it.” At the minimum age of seventeen and a half Clark asked his mother to sign the piece of paper that permitted him to join the Navy. In September 1961, when the rest of his high school class returned for its senior year, he left Plainview for basic training just outside of New Orleans.
His career in the Navy started as badly as his career in high school ended. When he arrived at training camp, he was given, along with every other new recruit, a multiple-choice aptitude test. He had never seen a multiple-choice test, and he didn’t know how to take one. To most of the questions several different answers struck him as at least partially correct. Instead of picking the one that seemed most correct, he just circled them all. The Navy assumed that he knew that circling more than one answer fooled the computer that graded the tests. They charged him with cheating, took him off the ordinary slow track for enlisted men, and put him on an even slower one for juvenile delinquents. Thus the first time Jim Clark ever heard of computers was when he was accused of trying to fool one into thinking he was smarter than he was.
The other recruits who took the multiple-choice test went into a classroom and obtained their high school equivalency diplomas. Clark alone found himself shipped out to sea. There he spent the next nine months, performing the most disgusting chores that need doing on a ship. Those nine months at sea have filled a lot of Clark’s memory. He recalls officers telling him that he was stupid, and bullies tossing plates full of food on the floor just so that he would have to clean them up. He returned to the Navy’s classroom convinced that Plainview, Texas, just might not be the world’s capital of shit. He took his first math test and