Seibeclass="underline" Was he a programmer or a hardware guy?
Fitzpatrick: He was an electrical engineer; he dabbled in programming. He taught me to program when I was five and jokes that I passed him up around six or seven. My mom says I was reading the Apple II programmers’ manual from the library at the same time as Clifford the Big Red Dog. Instead of “variables,” I would say, “valuables.” Some of my first memories are programming with my dad. Like he pulled me into the kitchen and he was writing down a program on paper. He asked, “What do you think it does?” I remember it was like, “10 PRINT HELLO, 20 GOTO 10.”
Seibeclass="underline" So you started with BASIC?
Fitzpatrick: Yeah, that was BASIC. I couldn’t do stuff with the mouse, or stuff with higher graphics modes and colors, until a friend of our family introduced me to C and gave me Turbo C. This was maybe when I was eight or ten. My dad moved to Intel in ’84 and we moved to Portland. He helped design the 386 and 486. He’s still at Intel. We always had new, fun computers.
Seibeclass="underline" Did you get into assembly programming at all?
Fitzpatrick: I did assembly a little on calculators. Like Z80 on the TI calculators, but that was about it.
Seibeclass="underline" Do you remember what it was that drew you to programming?
Fitzpatrick: I don’t know. It was just always fun. My mom had to cut me off and give me computer coupons to make me go outside and play with friends. My friends would come over: “Brad’s on the computer again. He’s so boring.” My mom’s like, “Go outside and play.”
Seibeclass="underline" Do you remember the first interesting program that you wrote?
Fitzpatrick: We had this Epson printer and it came with big, thick manuals with a programmers’ reference at the end. So I wrote something—this was back on an Apple—where I could draw something in the high graphics mode, and then, once my program finished drawing whatever it was drawing—lines or patterns or something—I’d hit control C and be typing in the background, in a frame buffer that’s not showing, and load my other program, which read the screen off and printed it.
Before that I remember writing something that every time I hit a key, it moved the head and I had wired backspace up to go backwards so as I typed it felt like a typewriter.
This was one of my first programs—it was something like K equals grab the next char. Then I said if K equals “a”, print “a”; if K is “b”, print “b”. I pretty much did every letter, number, and some punctuation. Then at one point I was like, “Wait, I could just say, ‘Print the variable!’” and I replaced 40 lines of code with one. I was like, “Holy shit, that was awesome!” That was some major abstraction for a six-year-old.
Those are the notable early ones. Then in middle school I would make games and I would make the graphics editors and the level editors for my friends, and my friends would make the graphics into levels, and then we would sell it to our classmates. I remember having to make games that detected EGA versus VGA. If one of ’em failed on VGA, it would fault back to EGA and use a different set of tiles that fit on the screen, so we’d have to have two sets of graphics for everything. People from school would buy it for like five bucks and they would go to install it and it wouldn’t work, and their parents would call my parents and yell, “Your son stole five dollars from my kid for this crap that doesn’t work.” My mom would drive me over there and sit in the cul-de-sac while I went in and debugged it and fixed it.
Seibeclass="underline" During that time did you take any classes on programming?
Fitzpatrick: Not really. It was all one or two books from the library, and then just playing around. There weren’t really forums or the Internet. At one point I got on a BBS, but the BBS didn’t really have anything on it. It wasn’t connected to the Net, so it was people playing board games.
Seibeclass="underline" Did your school have AP computer science or anything?
Fitzpatrick: Well, we didn’t have AP C.S., but we had a computer programming class. There was a guy teaching it but then I would teach sort of an advanced class in the back. They still use the graphics editor and the graphics library I wrote—their final project is to make a game. I still occasionally run into that C.S. teacher—he’s a friend of my family’s and I’ll see him at my brother’s soccer games—he’ll be like, “Yep, we still use your libraries.”
I did take the AP C.S. test. It was the last year it was in Pascal before they switched to C, which was one year before they switched to Java or something like that. I didn’t know Pascal so I went to a neighboring high school that had AP C.S. and I went to some night classes, like three or four of them. Then I found a book and learned the language, and I spent most of my time building asteroids in Pascal because I had just learned trig. I was like, “Oooh, sin and cosin; these are fun. I can get thrust and stuff like that.”
Seibeclass="underline" How’d you do?
Fitzpatrick: Oh, I got a five. I had to write bigint classes. Now that’s one of the interview questions I give people. “Write a class to do arbitrary, bigint manipulation with multiplication and division.” If I did it in high school on an AP test, they should be able to do it here.
Seibeclass="underline" Your freshman year in college you worked at Intel during the summer. Did you also work as a programmer during high school?
Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I worked at Tektronix for a while. Before I had any official job, I got some hosting account. I got kicked off of AOL for writing bots, flooding their chat rooms, and just being annoying. I was scripting the AOL client from another Windows program. I also wrote a bot to flood their online form to send you a CD. I used every variation of my name, because I didn’t want their duplicate suppression to only send me one CD, because they had those 100 free hours, or 5,000 free hours. I submitted this form a couple thousand times and for a week or so the postman would be coming with bundles of CDs wrapped up.
My mom was like, “Damn it, Brad, you’re going to get in trouble.” I was like, “Eh—their fucking fault, right?” Then one day I get a phone call and I actually picked up the phone, which I normally didn’t, and it was someone from AOL. They were just screaming at me. “Stop sending us all these form submissions!” I’m not normally this quick and clever, but I just yelled back, “Why are you sending me all this crap? Every day the postman comes! He’s dropping off all these CDs!” They’re like, “We’re so sorry, sir. It won’t happen again.” Then I used all those and I decorated my dorm room in college with them. I actually still have them in a box in the garage. I can’t get rid of them because I just remember them being such a good decoration at one point.
After I got kicked off of AOL, I got a shell account on some local ISP. That’s basically where I learned Unix. I couldn’t run CGI scripts, but I could FTP up, so I would run Perl stuff on my desktop at home to generate my whole website and then upload it. Then I got a job at Tektronix, like a summer intern job. I knew Perl really well and I knew web stuff really well, but I had never done dynamic web stuff. This was probably ’95, ’94—the web was pretty damn new.
Then I go to work at Tektronix and on my first day they’re introducing me to stuff, and they’re like, “Here’s your computer.” It’s this big SPARCstation or something running X and Motif. And, “Here’s your browser.” It’s Netscape 2 or something—I don’t remember. And, “If you have some CGIs, they go in this directory.” I remember I got a basic hello-world CGI, like three lines working that night and I was like, “Holy shit, this is so fun.” I was at work the next day at six in the morning and just going crazy with CGI stuff.