It took a lot of pressure and conniving, but we were finally able to wrestle an interview out of Bob Frankston, Nerd d'Extraordinaire and self-proclaimed old codger. Best known for his work in the development of the original computer spreadsheet, Bob's nerdliness continues to evolve. Bob's profile is peppered with evidence of his "contrarian tendencies": "I can easily get too philosophical and confuse the naïve and annoy the knowledgeable. Or I can rant and rave about the annoyance du jour, such as my current anger at eyeballpluckers…" Following is the not-ready-for-prime-time revelations of this most recent Nerd of the Week.

NW: What qualifies you as a Nerd of Distinction?
BF: That's for others to decide.

NW: How did your Nerd Life evolve?
BF: Back in the Old Country of Brooklyn… Well, it's hard to give a serious answer (I'm just not in the mood). But [my Nerd Life] started early. In elementary school, I remember always wondering what the odds were that I really did live in what they said was the greatest city in the greatest state in the…

Academically, I've always been facile enough to be able to explore ideas while otherwise still seeming functional. Social graces were never the highest priority. Programming gave me my modeling clay with which to not only build things but to make them actually do something. But the programming, in itself, wasn't the main attraction. I was much more interested in what I could do with it and, more important, what others could do. Given the opportunity to work on the provider side of commercial timesharing back in '66 (of the 1900's of course), I was able to indulge [this preoccupation].

My philosophical side has always been strong. This has made me see computing as more than just tinkering with parts. Concepts like intrinsic ambiguity and other issues raised by AI intrigue me. I'm also fascinated by how marketplaces like Personal Computing and the Internet have evolved, and what's behind the innovation often characterized as "Moore's Law". I view that law as a concept, not just as Gordon's pricing curve.

NW: What kind of work do you do?
BF: Work?

NW: Describe your first computer.
BF: The first "computer" I used was the IBM 1620. You can learn more about it at the Tech Museum… It had 20,000 digits of memory and no arithmetic capability. It just looked up the answer in tables you had to load. I still remember 160000000000 as the sequence one typed on the console typewriter (before typeballs) to clear memory. Language was a Fortran without subroutine calls and the computer leap years in a do by 4 loop took about five seconds each. And yes, it knew about the 100 and 400-year rules so I was prepared for 2000.

NW: What kind of computing equipment do you use at home?
BF: … I confess to excessive use of very unreliable X10 stuff.

NW: What are some of the coolest programming libraries you've used?
BF: Coolest library? Library? Nothing like the pneumatic tubes in the Brooklyn Public Library.

NW: Describe your best "real life" hack.
BF: Well, Milkin blames the 80's on VisiCalc, so that's probably the coolest hack. The other extreme was the one card (punched cards, 80 columns) debugger I did for an SDS 920 in '65 or the mailing list I did on an IBM 407 in 1970. But those are probably not what you're thinking of. More recently, I've been playing with pulling things off web sites so as to liberate the information from those who want to own me. There are too many interesting things to do than focus on "hacks" as such. The best ones are spontaneous and are only remembered as parts of larger tales.

NW: What's the most expensive piece of equipment you've fried?
BF: I've run up some large bills and broken various things. I don't think I've fried things as much as rendered them obsolete.

NW: What do you do for fun?
BF: Fun?

NW: Got any nerd role models or an ego ideal?
BF: Nerdiness should be [defined by] the failure to find role models.

NW: Where would you like to be five years from now?
BF: Alive?!?!

NW: How would you like to be remembered?
BF: "Well, he didn't do that much damage."

NW: Any other words of wisdom or well-kept secrets you'd care to divulge?
BF: Try as I might, suffering fools is not my strong point.