Salon.com > Michael Mattis

Craig Breedlove

Sat, 31 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000

The Black Rock Desert is a prehistoric dry alkali lake bed that lies like a 400-square-mile Formica countertop about two hours' drive north of Reno, Nev. If you love desert, it's the most beautiful place on Earth. If you don't, it's pure hell, a place where the sun hammers down as if the desert floor were the anvil of God.

Historians know it as the place where the California and Oregon trails diverge. Film noir buffs know it as the place where Spencer Tracy decked Ernest Borgnine in "Bad Day at Black Rock." More recently, Black Rock has become famous as home to the annual arty super-party known as Burning Man. It also claims a subtler fame: It's the place where men have traveled the fastest across the surface of the Earth.

For the past few years, Black Rock has been Craig Breedlove's home away from home. A dream brings Breedlove to Black Rock: to return the world land speed record from Britain to the United States and to be the first American to drive through the sound barrier. It's not a new project for Breedlove. In the 1960s he won celebrity as the fastest man on earth in his Spirit of America and Spirit of America: Sonic I jetmobiles. He was the first person to drive through the 400-, 500- and 600-mph marks. He set his last speed record -- 600.6 mph -- at Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah, 34 years ago. Now, at age 62 and with a newly modified and rebuilt Spirit of America, he's fixing to head out to Black Rock and claim the title once again. The number to beat: 771 miles per hour.

The Silicon Valley myth with a life of its own

Thu, 17 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

There's a scene in "Pirates of Silicon Valley" in which a cigarette-smoking Hewlett-Packard executive turns up his nose at Steve Wozniak (as played by Joey Slotnick) and his shabby-looking little Apple I prototype. "A computer for ordinary people?" sneers the bewildered exec. "What on earth would ordinary people want with computers?"

In current tech society, it's one of those scenes that have ascended to the level of high mythology: A demigod descends to earth to offer up his discovery to humanity; but stone-blind mankind, stumbling through the darkness, wouldn't know fire even if Prometheus stomped into its office and plunked it down on the desk. In the yupscale watering holes of Silicon Alley and Multimedia Gulch, people now roll their eyes when talking about how poor, dumb HP passed up the chance to lead the PC revolution. I mean ... duh!

But I get where HP was coming from when it turned down the Woz's brainchild. In the summer of 1977, when I was 13, the parents of the smart kid next-door bought an Apple II. It cost $1,300 -- a fortune at the time. I'd seen computers before, in the basement of the Sacramento Bee newspaper building, where my father still works as an editor. They didn't seem to do very much, except blink their lights and put hot-lead typesetters out of work.

Repurposing Ada

Tue, 16 Mar 1999 20:00:00 +0000

Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace, mathematician and English society hostess, daughter of the poet Byron, is today revered as something of a prophet. She's been the subject of at least three biographies, numerous articles, essays and, most recently, a movie starring Tilda Swinton. By one account, visitors to Ada's grave outnumber those to her father's.

That's not as surprising as at first it seems: Today, technology means more to most people than poetry, and Ada's fame derives from her collaboration, in the 1840s, with Charles Babbage -- the cantankerous intellectual who tried, and failed, to build what might have been the world's first computer, the Analytical Engine.

For her work with Babbage, Ada has recently been granted such grandiose monikers as "the world's first programmer," "the mother of computing," "the mother of the modern computer," "inventor of the first computer language" and "mathematical genius." She's been distinguished by the United States Army, which named its universal programming language Ada in her honor in 1983. The book "1,000 Years, 1,000 People: Ranking the Men and Women Who Shaped the Millennium" ranks Ada at number 960, coming in for the show right behind John von Neumann's 959. (Babbage himself galloped ahead of both to place at number 351. Bill Gates got lost in the backstretch.) She was even profiled in the official companion book to last year's Lilith Fair.