Peter Norton Part III: Summer of Elegance

His first summer after college, Peter Norton took a job with a firm that prepared statistical data for insurance companies. In those years the work was done on adding machines--until one day his supervisor took him to a room filled with whirring electronic gear, pointed to it, and said: "Kid, we bought a computer and we don't know how to use it. There's the manual; see if you can figure it out."

Peter fell instantly in love with programming. It was a passion aided by the absence of chaperones: nobody in the company understood computers, so nobody bothered him. For someone who savored being left to find his own way, it was virtual heaven.

Soon he was writing programs at a blazing pace, and it was then that he began to understand the elusive "aesthetics of math," and especially the notion of "elegance." "Elegance," usually applied to mathematical proofs, is a hard concept for nonmathmaticians, but it means both "cleverness" or "intelligence," and "economy": A proof is "elegant" if there can be no more concise or brilliant way of proving the same thing. In programming, the same aesthetic ideal existed--but as a practical demand, because a program was simply more efficient and affordable if it had elegance.* The passionate interest that had eluded Peter Norton elsewhere hit home here. Now he had the talent he had lacked for calligraphy, and the privacy he needed to teach himself the craft. Unambitious and extremely private, he found computer programming almost a perfect escape.

*When Peter Norton started programming, "elegance" was desparately needed because computer memories were so small and computer time was so expensive that inelegant programs either wouldn't fit in the machines or ran too slowly to be workable.

Excerpted from
The Great American Idea Book: How to Make Money from Your Ideas for Movies, Music, Books, Inventions, Businesses and Almost Anything Else!
Authors: Bob Coleman & Deborah Neville
Publisher: WW Norton
Copyright: 1993; 1995
All Rights Reserved