The Wizard Of OS/2

James E. Lalonde
The Seattle Times

March 27, 1988

You would never find it, hidden away in the often misty woods of north King County, beyond locked gates, in an exclusive estate filled with otherwise run-of-the-million-dollar suburban chateaus, but if ever there was a wizard's house, this is it. There are few external clues to the magic of the place, just an odd swirling watermark on the expansive black asphalt roof and a dramatic 10-foot-high, arched cedar doorway which stares down like an owl's eye at all who dare approach the modern home's medieval double doors. Yet replete with hidden passages, trapdoors and a sauna-equipped dungeon, this is a house with a mind of its own, a home which knows when you arrive and records your every move so that it may predict your needs. It's the perfect house for a technological sorcerer like Gordon Letwin.

While the Merlins of old labored to turn lead into gold, Letwin is one of the new generation who no less wondrously make electrons dance within the minute halls of microchips. ``There are some common elements between high-level software and traditional magic,'' explains Letwin of his fondness for crystal balls, alchemist's wands and a computer-inhabited house such as this one. ``In traditional magic, if you cast extremely complicated incantations exactly right, then you'd force this very powerful being into doing your bidding, but if you got the tiniest detail wrong, then you were dead meat. And that's exactly what it's like dealing with a sophisticated computer system. It is extremely esoteric, extremely strange. And if you get it exactly right then the beast does your bidding. Otherwise it chews you up.''

So far, Letwin seems to have gotten it exactly right. Standing on the exotic stoop of his nearly finished house one recent workday noon, wearing his usual Hawaiian shirt, safari pants, black socks (always something black, his favorite color) and white tennis shoes, and carrying a shabby cardboard box containing one of the 15 homemade computers which will make up the brains of his new abode, the long-haired Letwin looks more like a 1970s graduate student than a world-class computer scientist. But like his house and his craft, Letwin is deceptively extraordinary.

One of Microsoft's first dozen programmers, he is chief architect for systems software and thus one of the top two scientists responsible for creating new programs at the world's largest PC software company. His working domain includes the various operating systems which run PCs, as well as the intricate computer languages used by other programmers to write business and game applications. Although largely unknown outside the industry, Letwin's work has influenced the way millions of people use personal computers.

``He is the guy I turn to in any sort of tough systems technical thing,'' says Microsoft co-founder and Chairman Bill Gates, who describes Letwin as both a close friend and one of the more unusual characters and brilliant programmers he's ever met.

Letwin played a primary role in the development of OS/2, the new PC operating system jointly developed by IBM and Microsoft. OS/2 (the initials stand for ``operating system'') is the Type A personality of PC operating systems. Unlike previous personal-computer operating systems such as DOS, which do one thing at a time, OS/2 can perform ``multitasking,'' or several duties at once. For instance, a user can write a letter while also sending a file over a telephone line and simultaneously printing out the chapter of a book. OS/2 also can handle 25 times as much computer memory as its predecessor DOS, and thus handle huge documents. While Letwin's work is invisible to most PC users, OS/2 will change the way millions of people use and interconnect their PCs over the next decade.

While IBM helped develop OS/2, and Letwin is quick to point out that OS/2 is far too complex for one individual to claim as his own, Gates and others say that as Microsoft's architect for OS/2, Letwin could be called the father of OS/2. And that his influence will grow with the acceptance of OS/2.

``His position as a guru of OS/2 will undoubtedly add to his stature,'' says Bob Frankston, chief scientist at Lotus Development Corp., maker of Lotus 1-2-3 and arch-rival to Microsoft. ``I am in a position where I have to place bets (on the operating systems of the future), and I am betting a lot on OS/2.''

Letwin's importance to Microsoft is perhaps most tangibly reflected in his stock holdings. He is one of the top half a dozen employee shareholders. In 1981, Letwin was granted 293,850 shares of Microsoft stock, when the company was incorporated by Gates and co-founder Paul Allen. Microsoft's stock has since split two for one, and Letwin's shares are now worth around $30 million, give or take a few million, depending on the mood of the market.

Yet if Gates, 32, has the distinction of being the world's best-known software whiz, Letwin, 35, remains for now one of the least known, an enigma to many even within Microsoft.

He is described by Microsoft spokesman Marty Taucher as ``a bit of a mystery man.'' His ability to find flaws in software code has earned him respect, but his incisiveness has driven some programmers to tears. Nevertheless, Gates and other close friends describe Letwin as one of the most sincere and wittiest people they know. And with the publication by Microsoft of Letwin's first book, ``Inside OS/2,'' Gates maintains that ``the guy won't be unknown for long.''

Ironically, Letwin got his job with Microsoft in part by criticizing Bill Gates' first opus, a version of BASIC, a simple programming language for personal computers. Gates was the first to successfully adapt BASIC for use with PCs.

Gates had abandoned Harvard in his second year to launch Microsoft with his high-school friend, Allen. Allen preferred dealing with the technology, and so it was the business-minded Gates' job to sell the fledgling PC world Microsoft's version of BASIC. At about the same time, Letwin had landed a job out of Purdue University writing systems software for Heath Company, which had developed its own personal computer kit. But when Gates knocked on Heath's door in late 1977, Letwin was not particularly pleased.

``I went out there in the days that we had about 10 people, all programmers,'' recalls Gates, beginning to laugh as he tells the story. ``So I would go around and talk to manufacturers about using our BASIC. They had Gordon come in the room. He had written (his own version of) BASIC. Of course his BASIC, he thought, was better than mine.

``There are different ways to do this stuff. His had some advantages which he was pointing out to me. We ended up in this argument between two technical guys. There were about 15 people in the room and no one else could follow along. We're talking all in terms of the data structure, single representations, double scan, stuff like that. . . . Like if you typed in a bad line, his would immediately check the syntax, and mine wouldn't. Which is one of the negative points of our design. Anyway, he was being very sarcastic about that, telling me how dumb that was.''

``They didn't know what to do with Gordon. They knew he was super good, but they couldn't really understand what Gordon was up to or what he was going to do. So they decided to buy our BASIC, which really teed Gordon off.''

It was not your standard job interview, but like two boxers after a match, the two software scientists left the ring if not friends, with mutual respect. Gates took Letwin to dinner.

``Everyone thought I was just going to go away with the impression that this guy was just some prima donna. But Gordon was in on micros super early,'' says Gates. ``And I walked away from that knowing that Gordon was a very, very smart programmer.''

About nine months later, in 1978, Gates talked Letwin into joining Microsoft.

Letwin was a bit enigmatic even to his own parents. He was a real smart kid, caught in the '60s and '70s. He was alienated from most of his peers because he came of age when bright kids like him were branded nerds, and alienated from his parents because those were the years when long hair like his was a declaration of rebellion.

``He hasn't changed a bit,'' sighs his father, Fred Letwin, a retired insurance actuary now living in Arizona. ``He has been the same all his life. A very concentrated, serious type of individual.''

The family tried to interest young Gordon in social activities, like dancing lessons or Boy Scouts, as he grew up in Indianapolis, but the distractions never took. Letwin read incessantly, says his father, bringing home a dozen non-fiction books at a time from the library, devouring them the way other kids read comics. ``We'd go out in the car and he would take a book. And I used to say, `Well Gordon, if you don't look out the window, you will never know when you are home.' I used to look over his shoulder and wonder what in the world he was reading. . . . One day, he was maybe 13 or 14, he was reading a book on the functioning of the brain and he was in the chapter on brain surgery. I gave up from then on.''

``None of it worked, and I am happy about that,'' says Gordon Letwin. ``I haven't danced in 20 years.''

Leaning back in a chair in his cluttered cubicle at Microsoft, Letwin can laugh nervously about it all now. But it is clear he hated his high school days. It was a world ruled by student mediocrity and what he calls ``pocket tyrants,'' those teachers who mistook authority and memorization for education. ``High school wasn't like hell for me, but it was pretty uncomfortable,'' he says. ``I was just anxious for it to end. My social skills weren't very strong and I didn't have that many peers. Fortunately I wasn't like in the top ten scapegoats. I was just a nondescript nerd type who would be sort of picked on semi-randomly.''

It wasn't until college in 1970 that his journey began full speed into the world of software. His father wanted him to make something of his intellectual talents. He talked Letwin into registering as a physics major at Purdue University. Gordon was not thrilled. ``Those were the days when they were building nuclear power plants, and everybody said, take physics, get a good job building nuclear power plants,'' he says wryly. After six months at Purdue, Letwin, who had nearly perfect scores on his SAT college entrance exams, was failing physics. He had abandoned his classes for the university's computer center, where he'd taken a job. And his father threw up his hands again, but did not interfere.

When Gordon Letwin talks of his descent into the world of computer programming, the circles of hell in Dante's Divine Comedy come to a layman's mind, although for Letwin it was all Paradise.

He began his journey to software heaven in college. After first ``playing'' with relatively simple programming languages, such as Fortran, Letwin was shocked one day to find that as a joke a graduate student had used a more powerful and mysterious computer language to bypass Letwin's own commands, and to ``lace'' his computer cards with holes. The more advanced programmer had used something called assembly language to perform this trick. It was the kind of code in which, more than a decade later, OS/2, among many other programs, would be written.

As Letwin explains it, computer language, the code humans use to get computers to do things, can be envisioned as a multi-layered sphere made up of increasingly complex layers of languages, with the computer at the center. The outside layer is English. As one moves toward the center of this nether world, the languages become more complex: first BASIC, for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, then FORTRAN, for Formula Translation language, COBOL, for Common Business Oriented Language, and so on downward toward the core of this universe, where ultimately math is the language which makes those electrons dance to the programmer's tune. The language nearest this inscrutable core is called assembly language. And for Letwin, the discovery of this deeper, inner world was like first love.

``It was (my first look at) the true underlying language of reality that controlled the internals of the computer,'' Letwin says, his eyes still lighting up as he recalls the discovery. ``It was completely cryptic stuff. It was totally incomprehensible. It was like showing candy to a kid.''

Letwin saw his future in a world still alien to all but the exclusive but growing cadre of computer scientists around the country, including a couple of high school students in Seattle named Gates and Allen.

Just as he had settled in with his first love _ computers _ Letwin met his first human love, Rose. They met when Gordon was a freshman and she was a sophomore, studying mechanical engineering. It was love at first sight.

``I was a nerd, too,'' says Rose matter of factly. ``Most of the women at Purdue, well, they were taking home ec, looking for a husband. . . . I didn't wear makeup. I read a lot of books. I was very smart. I knew where I was going and I knew what I wanted. I hadn't dated at all in high school because the guys were all afraid of me.''

Then, as she was studying one night, sitting at the back of a dark school hall, Gordon ``opened the door and I sort of fell back and he said hello. He said he'd been back there developing prints and asked me if I wanted to see them.

``I fell head over heels, (in love this time) and so did he,'' Rose says. ``Even though I was so young, I knew it was just right.''

When the pair announced that they intended to get married, Letwin's father had another battle of wills with his son. He advised Gordon not to get married so young, not to get married without a job and he gave him various other solid, fatherly advice. And then he threw up his hands.

``I said, `OK, but, the conditions are, you marry. You support your wife,' '' recalls Fred Letwin, with a mixture of pride and lingering paternal scolding. `` `I will give you the money I would have given you if you were single.'

``Well they did marry and they were the two poorest kids going to Purdue. They lived in the slum area of the city (West Lafayette). And they lived on practically nothing.''

``It wasn't like real poverty,'' says Gordon Letwin, ``because you know it will end. Anyway, it's actually in my nature, I'm Scottish. Scotland was a real tough place to live, and people who weren't frugal didn't survive.''

About a year after he had joined Microsoft, Letwin became antsy. He was well aware of the coming boom in personal computers. He knew his fortunes would be found writing software for the right company, but he was uncertain if Microsoft was the winning horse or if he would be riding it if it ever won the race.

``Bill and Paul owned everything. . . . I didn't have any equity,'' says Letwin, ``so I still wasn't riding a horse. I was still just walking around looking at them.''

He started looking around at other companies, too. One day, after he had spoken with the president of another software company, he left the man's home phone number lying out in the open. ``Bill Gates has this incredible memory, and sometimes it gets him in trouble,'' says Letwin with a restrained grin. ``He recognized the number of the president, and he knew it was in my handwriting. So he called me in . . . and I told him what I was thinking. . . . That really wasn't the trigger for Microsoft going public (incorporating, in 1981), but that was one of the factors. I imagine other people were putting pressures on Bill (for stock options).''

Faced with competition for good people like Letwin from other companies, and the basic principle of sharing Microsoft's potential gains with the people building the company, Gates and Allen incorporated their partnership, granting Letwin and several other key employees major, 1 percent-plus shares of the new company.

``It changed things quite a bit. I finally felt like I had a participatory stake in a really important venture,'' Letwin says. ``One thing it gives you is a feeling for the company as a whole versus your individual project . . . a strong motivation to work for success of company versus the success of your personal project. It felt good to participate in that.''

Letwin clearly was on the winning horse. That 1 percent-plus share of the company was to make him a multi-millionaire the day Microsoft went public with its stock, five years later, in 1986.

Yet both Letwins remained frugal until that public offering was completed. They gave (and continue to give) 20 percent of their income to various environmental charities, but otherwise retained their modest, extended graduate-school lifestyle. They continued to drive ``beater'' economy cars. And until this month's move into their new cedar castle, they remained in the same modest house they'd purchased in the suburbs in 1979, a ``temporary'' residence infamous for its constantly evolving college dorm clutter of stereo equipment, books and various electronic ``toys'' that caught their peripatetic imaginations.

``The house was always chaos. It always amused me,'' says Estelle Mathers, formerly Bill Gates' secretary and still a close friend of both Letwins. ``Here was Gordon, this really brilliant, crazy man expressing himself in the most incredibly intelligent ways, living with this clutter around him.''

The only real luxury Letwin and his wife afforded themselves until the construction of their new house this past year was to indulge Rose's passion for travel. Together they have scuba dived in Hawaii, camped beneath Ayers Rock in Australia and climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa.

Still, says Rose, ``I don't think Gordon would travel much if it weren't for me.'' Married 16 years, Rose Letwin blushes like a new bride when asked what Gordon Letwin enjoys most in life, other than writing software code: ``Being with me,'' she smiles.

After years of devouring books on nearly every subject, Letwin can deliver an erudite yet witty speech, when he is thrust upon the podium. In January, as a luncheon speaker, he managed to crack up an audience of the nation's top financial analysts while explaining OS/2, no small accomplishment on either count.

And in private conversation, Letwin has earned a reputation as a relentless iconoclast. No subject is safe: Take Letwin on one of his favorite topics, children. He puts a blistering new spin on old W.C. Fields jokes.

``The world has something to do with it,'' he says of his and Rose's decision not to have children. ``I mean, you have kids so that your neighbors have something to eat when the food chain breaks down, right?

``Basically, having a kid is an 18-year sentence . . . I can understand the emotional attraction of generating a mixture of yourself and someone you love,'' he says. ``The problem is that the reality is often not so great. . . . We might end up with a guy whose I.Q. is 90 who thinks that rock music, or whatever we disapprove of, is the height of reality and whose greatest ambition in life is to be a wino.''

Or, ask Letwin about God and the meaning of life:

``You can quote Twain on that, right? God is a malign thug?'' he replies. ``I don't know if there is a God. Literally I don't know that there isn't some extremely powerful organism that isn't occasionally sticking his hand in. But he wouldn't bear any resemblance to any classical form of God. . . . I guess I'd say that if God exists and is anything like the official Christian God, then I don't want to have anything to do with him. He's not my kind of guy.''

And even when he is talking about himself and his craft, about which he is passionately serious, he is equally relentless.

``Do I think that the world hinges on how fast people can do their spreadsheets? Clearly not,'' he says. ``My thrust is in making these things happen. I care about building powerful, sophisticated _ and to my specialized viewpoint _ beautiful systems which will do important work for you . . . do things you could never do before. I care about that a lot.''

Despite his rebel image, he is upset by modern-day hackers. ``The old guard always thinks that the new generation is a disaster,'' he says. ``I think that trying to get around the constraints in a system is an honorable thing to do, but this new generation is leaning toward vandalism, and I think this is a disaster. I was a hacker, but I never damaged anything. I was out to extend my control, not destroy anything.''

He concedes a moment later that there is an ominous side to the current PC computer revolution. ``If anything the biggest problem with more efficient information tools is that those (computer) tools tend to aid organizations rather than individuals. That's why I don't give anyone my Social Security number. Every magazine I subscribe to I use a slightly different variation of the address, so it's harder for them to correlate the information.''

Is he paranoid?

``It's not paranoid if they are really after you,'' he retorts.

Letwin sometimes wonders if ``perhaps I am playing the part of the orchestra conductor on the deck of the Titanic. But what's to be done about that? Despair and suicide? I don't know how to deal with the fact that the world seems to be disintegrating. And I believe the world is disintegrating. But I don't know how to prevent that.''

On a more intimate social level, Letwin often comments with his feet. ``Sometimes in a social setting, if things aren't clicking just right,'' says Gates, ``the next thing you know, you turn around and Gordon is just not there. If he is uncomfortable, boy, he really just leaves.''

But despite Letwin's biting intellect and sometimes volcanic moods, his friends and colleagues are intensely loyal and even protective. ``The thing people often miss about the guy,'' says Microsoft's vice-president for systems software, Steve Ballmer, Letwin's boss and a close friend, ``is that he has a heart of gold.''

``He still is defying the world,'' explains William Mathers, an eye surgeon whom Letwin describes as one of his best intellectual friends. ``And in a way, Gordon feels that he has triumphed. (His success at Microsoft) is a vindication of the person that he believes himself to be . . . a good person, a very moral person.''

Most of all, says Mathers of Letwin, ``he doesn't want to be judged on trivial aspects. For he is in many ways a totally non-trivial person. He wants to get at the truth.''

Having money, says Rose, means ``not having to prioritize so heavily.'' And in terms of their new home, it meant they could have complexity, mystery, security and, of course, fun. ``This house, it is really like a huge toy to both of us,'' she confesses. ``It has all the really neat things in it that we could think up.''

For Gordon Letwin, the house was the chance to apply software architecture to residential architecture. ``One thing about software designers,'' Letwin says, ``is that they always want to have a model of the entire environment in which they are working and know everything that is going on in that environment. The entire environment here is our entire property. With this place, I would just like to know where the sparrow falls. We want to feel we are fully in touch with everything. And your senses obviously aren't good enough to do that.''

And the meandering interior floor plan of the house does defy the senses. The place is a dizzy labyrinth of playful rooms, where one encounters ceramic dinosaurs protruding from the kitchen fireplace and a Phantom of the Opera balcony jutting from the library, which is visible up over the 28-foot-high foyer, but cannot be reached without passage through a secret door which is controlled by the computer. Both Gordon and Rose ``buy books by the sack full, and read them fast,'' explains Jim Gallup, the working architect of the house, and they wanted the 12,000-volume library to be a special place.

The computer will be fed information by switches and sensors planted strategically about the Japanese landscaped grounds and embedded throughout the maze-like interior of the 20-room, three-story, 6,500-square-foot house. When Gordon and Rose are home alone, the computers, ``know this,'' and will control doors such as the hidden library passage, and turn on and off lights for the Letwins, all without being ordered to do so. It will learn and predict their needs by tracking their wanderings at various hours throughout the house.

``This entire house,'' says Letwin proudly, ``is like one giant peripheral. There are programs you use to control computer hardware called peripheral drivers, like printer drivers and stuff. It is fun to write those programs because you can see an actual embodiment of your work, the levers move up and down, the arms move in and out. And when you write the program more cleverly, the whole thing moves faster. And so this whole house is going to be a giant peripheral. All the lighting, the hi-fi systems, the intercom systems, the camera, all that stuff is under computer control. . . . It's a real snug environment for us.''

It has been a long journey home for Letwin, from Indianapolis, where he went to high school, and from Purdue, where he was ``not one of the big men on campus.'' Yes, he admits, there is a small sense of revenge in it all.

``When I was in school I used to play this game,'' he recalls, ``the lunar lander game. There weren't any pictures or anything, it was just literally a screen of numbers. And myself and the other programmers would watch these numbers change and be really caught up in this game. And I would be landing on the moon and I would be trying to rotate around. . . . Other people wandering through would just say . . . `It's just a screen of numbers. That is stupid.' ''

As it turned out, Letwin's vision was clear. The moon was there, in the numbers. Now, with Rose at his side, he has finally landed.

James E. Lalonde is High-Technology Reporter for the Seattle Times Business Section.

CUTLINE: LETWIN AND HIS WIFE SPEND A COUPLE OF MORNINGS A WEEK OUT ON HIGH-TECH GEAR AT A HEALTH CLUB IN REDMOND.

CUTLINE: ROSE'S LOVE OF TRAVEL HAS TAKEN THE LETWINS AS FAR UP A KILIMANJARO AND AS FAR DOWN AS THE OCEAN FLOOR OFF HAWAII'S KONA COAST.

CUTLINE: DURING THE PAST YEAR THE LETWINS HAVE WATCHED THEIR IMAGINATIONS TAKE SHAPE AS THE HOUSE THEY DESIGNED WAS BEING COMPLETED.

CUTLINE: THE USUAL ATTIRE OF MICROSOFT IS UPSCALE-CASUAL, BUT EVEN SO, LETWIN'S UNTUCKED HAWAIIAN-STYLE SHIRTS STAND OUT.

CUTLINE: WITH IS RESIDENT-GURU STATUS, LETWIN SPENDS HIS WORK HOURS PRIMARILY ALONE IN A DARKENED OFFICE. MEETINGS ARE BRIEF AND FOCUSED ON HIS PROJECTS.

Caption: FCM; Caption: (FOR OTHER CUTLINES SEE END OF TEXT)

Copyright 1988