no chance at hitting ten thousand hours by the time the professional hockey teams start looking for players. And without ten thousand hours under his belt, there is no way he can ever master the skills necessary to play at the top level. Even Mozart—the greatest musical prodigy of all time—couldn’t hit his stride until he had his ten thousand hours in. Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.
The other interesting thing about that ten thousand hours, of course, is that ten thousand hours is an
enormous
amount of time. It’s all but impossible to reach that number all by yourself by the time you’re a young adult. You have to have parents who encourage and support you. You can’t be poor, because if you have to hold down a part-time job on the side to help make ends meet, there won’t be time left in the day to practice enough. In fact, most people can reach that number only if they get into some kind of special program—like a hockey all-star squad—or if they get some kind of extraordinary opportunity that gives them a chance to put in those hours.
3.
So, back to Bill Joy. It’s 1971. He’s tall and gawky and sixteen years old. He’s the math whiz, the kind of student that schools like MIT and Caltech and the University of Waterloo attract by the hundreds. “When Bill was a little kid, he wanted to know everything about everything way before he should’ve even known he wanted to know,” his father, William, says. “We answered him when we could. And when we couldn’t, we would just give him a book.” When it came time to apply to college, Joy got a perfect score on the math portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test. “It wasn’t particularly hard,” he says matter-of-factly. “There was plenty of time to check it twice.”
He has talent by the truckload. But that’s not the only consideration. It never is. The key to his development is that he stumbled across that nondescript building on Beal Avenue.
In the early 1970s, when Joy was learning about programming, computers were the size of rooms. A single machine (which might have less power and memory than your microwave now has) could cost upwards of a million dollars—and that’s in 1970s dollars. Computers were rare. If you found one, if was hard to get access to it; if you managed to get access, renting time on it cost a fortune.
What’s more, programming itself was extraordinarily tedious. This was the era when computer programs were created using cardboard punch cards. Each line of code was imprinted on the card using a keypunch machine. A complex program might include hundreds, if not thousands, of these cards in tall stacks. Once a program was ready, you walked over to whatever mainframe computer you had access to and gave the stack of cards to an operator. Since computers could handle only one task at a time, the operator made an appointment for your program, and depending on how many people were ahead of you in line, you might not get your cards back for a few hours or even a day. And if you made even a single error—even a typographical error—in your program, you had to take the cards back, track down the error, and begin the whole process again.
Under those circumstances, it was exceedingly difficult for anyone to become a programming expert. Certainly becoming an expert by your early twenties was all but impossible. When you can “program” for only a few minutes out of every hour you spend in the computer room, how can you ever get in ten thousand hours of practice? “Programming with cards,” one computer scientist from that era remembers, “did not teach you programming. It taught you patience and proofreading.”
It wasn’t until the mid-1960s that a solution to the programming problem emerged. Computers were finally powerful enough that they could handle more than one “appointment” at once. If the computer’s operating system was rewritten, computer
The other interesting thing about that ten thousand hours, of course, is that ten thousand hours is an
enormous
amount of time. It’s all but impossible to reach that number all by yourself by the time you’re a young adult. You have to have parents who encourage and support you. You can’t be poor, because if you have to hold down a part-time job on the side to help make ends meet, there won’t be time left in the day to practice enough. In fact, most people can reach that number only if they get into some kind of special program—like a hockey all-star squad—or if they get some kind of extraordinary opportunity that gives them a chance to put in those hours.
3.
So, back to Bill Joy. It’s 1971. He’s tall and gawky and sixteen years old. He’s the math whiz, the kind of student that schools like MIT and Caltech and the University of Waterloo attract by the hundreds. “When Bill was a little kid, he wanted to know everything about everything way before he should’ve even known he wanted to know,” his father, William, says. “We answered him when we could. And when we couldn’t, we would just give him a book.” When it came time to apply to college, Joy got a perfect score on the math portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test. “It wasn’t particularly hard,” he says matter-of-factly. “There was plenty of time to check it twice.”
He has talent by the truckload. But that’s not the only consideration. It never is. The key to his development is that he stumbled across that nondescript building on Beal Avenue.
In the early 1970s, when Joy was learning about programming, computers were the size of rooms. A single machine (which might have less power and memory than your microwave now has) could cost upwards of a million dollars—and that’s in 1970s dollars. Computers were rare. If you found one, if was hard to get access to it; if you managed to get access, renting time on it cost a fortune.
What’s more, programming itself was extraordinarily tedious. This was the era when computer programs were created using cardboard punch cards. Each line of code was imprinted on the card using a keypunch machine. A complex program might include hundreds, if not thousands, of these cards in tall stacks. Once a program was ready, you walked over to whatever mainframe computer you had access to and gave the stack of cards to an operator. Since computers could handle only one task at a time, the operator made an appointment for your program, and depending on how many people were ahead of you in line, you might not get your cards back for a few hours or even a day. And if you made even a single error—even a typographical error—in your program, you had to take the cards back, track down the error, and begin the whole process again.
Under those circumstances, it was exceedingly difficult for anyone to become a programming expert. Certainly becoming an expert by your early twenties was all but impossible. When you can “program” for only a few minutes out of every hour you spend in the computer room, how can you ever get in ten thousand hours of practice? “Programming with cards,” one computer scientist from that era remembers, “did not teach you programming. It taught you patience and proofreading.”
It wasn’t until the mid-1960s that a solution to the programming problem emerged. Computers were finally powerful enough that they could handle more than one “appointment” at once. If the computer’s operating system was rewritten, computer
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