Fatal System Error Read Online Free

commercial-grade fireworks they had picked up in town and toasted the entry of 2004.

    While he was enjoying himself, Barrett was also contemplating a big move, one that would push him further into the arms of Mickey and his cohorts. Barrett wanted to start his own company, and he needed some financial backers. Mickey appreciated what Barrett could do, had experience running his own business, and obviously had cash to spare. Maybe he and his circle weren’t Boy Scouts, but they had no problem taking risks.

    BARRETT HAD ALREADY COME PRETTY FAR, especially for a kid with a profound learning disability. As a child in the Sierra foothill towns of Rocklin and Auburn, California, Barrett had been bright, inquisitive, and happy, often leading other children in games and playing the peacemaker. But during first grade, he struggled with spelling and wouldn’t learn to read. The next year, school officials gave him a battery of tests and informed his parents that there was nothing wrong with him—he just didn’t want to learn. At the school’s urging, Barrett’s father, Bruce, a naturally intense lawyer, kept his son up late night after night, forcing him to study. Barrett tried so hard that he finally told his mother that he thought it would be a relief to die. With that, Barrett’s mother, Pat, brought him to the home of a new psychologist for another round of tests. This specialist rendered a different verdict: clear intelligence shackled by dyslexia. Without intervention, she said, Barrett would never graduate high school. “His mind is a Ferrari engine without a transmission,” the psychologist explained. Barrett’s parents found a school an hour away in Sacramento run by an expert who had developed dyslexia tests for the state of California. They enrolled him for third grade. The school staff found that Barrett had been coping with vision problems so intense that when reading, he saw three lines of identical text. He had been gamely trying to follow the clearest one. Barrett also had great difficulty turning letters into sounds. The staff designed a curriculum just for him and taught Barrett such tricks as putting his finger on the printed page at periods and using it to trace the shape of commas. Imagining a cable running through his head helped with the triple vision. Barrett later found the same techniques gave him the power to visualize in three dimensions things that remained hopelessly abstract to most people, such as what was happening inside computers. Barrett’s younger brother Andy, who suffered from attention deficit disorder, tagged along to the new school as well. Barrett still didn’t like the work much, but at last he could function.

    After the family moved to Auburn, Barrett returned to a conventional school for sixth grade. Bullies picked on him, and it was tricky taking a mix of advanced classes and special-education sessions. When his father upgraded his law office’s computers and brought the deposed IBM machine home, though, spell-check and a world of other possibilities came with it. Barrett read a manual about the Internet, took more encouragement from a seventh-grade computer teacher, and soon became so obsessed that he fought with his parents when they set any time for him to turn off the computer and get to bed. His parents would insist that the machine be shut down when they went to sleep. But if they woke up later, the computer was back on. Fuming, Bruce Lyon went outdoors one night and shut off the fuse sending electricity to Barrett’s part of the house. When he rose in the morning, he saw that his son had snaked extension cords together to reach a working outlet.

    Even before the Netscape browser made cruising the Web easy for PC owners, Barrett wanted more than his own machine could give him. He and close friend Peter Avalos set up a server running the free operating system Linux that they could tap into from anywhere. It hosted Web pages and Internet Relay Chat. It stored files and