A Dawn, Shawn fanning lay on the brown carpet in the shadow of a converted bar counter, consumed by the idea. He had been awake 60 straight hours writing code on his notebook computer. In his daze, the idea appeared to him as something tangible—a hard, shiny piece of black metal—that he had to forge and form so that it became usable, so that the hard black metal was transformed into a friendly tool, so that the 0s and 1s, the Windows API protocols and Unix server commands, were all somehow buffed and polished and worked to a fine, wonderful, simple application. That was his idea. And it was big and frightening and full of implications, and it filled him up, this 18-year-old college dropout sprawled on the floor in his uncle's office, in what used to be a restaurant, across the street from the breaking waves in Hull, Mass.
展开▼
