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from high school. He badly wanted to go to Carnegie Mellon University, the superior computer-science school that was home to CERT and the alma mater of several of the young programmers at his uncle’s Chess.net. But Shawn didn’t get in, and in the fall of 1998 he enrolled at Northeastern University in Boston. The introductory computer courses were below his level, so he partied, had a good time, and didn’t learn much. It was far more interesting to be in w00w00, meeting people like Dug Song and Jordan Ritter.

RITTER WAS BORN IN 1978 in Northridge, near Los Angeles, the only child of a heavy-drinking mother and a drug-addicted father. Two years later, as his parents divorced and his father disappeared, he moved with his mother near Dallas. She ran a jewelry business and dated affluent men in the hunting-and-horse-jumping set, including one she would marry. Ritter played baseball and soon placed into advanced programs in school. His natural father reappeared when Ritter was in elementary school and would fade in and out as he moved around and battled various drug habits. Ritter believes his father was a good man with problems who was unusually vague about his past: He thinks his father worked for a secret government agency in Vietnam. His father’s brother, Donald Ritter, found a more mainstream outlet for a similar drive, serving as a U.S. congressman from Pennsylvania for fourteen years.

At twelve, Ritter moved to the first of a series of homes in Florida, near where his father was living in a double-wide trailer and running a gardening business. Ritter stayed in Florida through high school and would visit his father every few weeks. One Christmas, perhaps angry that her thirteen-year-old son had chosen that day to visit his father, Ritter’s mother called and drunkenly told him not to come home. Ritter was crushed, but his father was overjoyed, seeming to have been waiting for just such an opportunity. Ritter moved in with his father, staying close until he left for college. The pair had a loving but rocky relationship that sometimes erupted in physical fights. To keep the peace, Ritter went to stay in his own trailer next door.

In high school, Ritter threw himself into music, playing multiple instruments in multiple bands. He also devoured computer languages and

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