Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

[First quarter?] revenue was about $16—after the sunk costs sunk in, after Cohen paid his partners back for helping bail him out of utilities debt — before the threeway split. But by summer 1994, they were making enough to pay for the hiring of two employees, the daughters of Raffaella and Salvatore “Super Sal” [Trappezi/Trapezzi?], the bookkeeper and superintendent, respectively, of The Clinger’s. [“Salvatrice would have been about 20 then, and Heather about 16.] [[They would become employees #1 and #25 of Tetration, after Heather insisted on skipping the intermediary numerals in favor of 25, the number of Barry Bonds, the leftfield lefthanded slugger of the Giants, apparently, and so even today Tetration has 24 fewer employees than the personnel ops spreadsheets would indicate.”]]

Salvatrice, then 20, and Heather, 16, were paid $8/hour for data entry. Salvatrice would check the synop@diatessaron.stanford.edu email, verify “first level uniquity,” as a new site was called inhouse, or “second level uniquity,” as a new url was called inhouse, and copypaste to the DDbase appropriately. Heather, who was still a junior at Oceana High School, would report after school and relieve her sister. It was her job to update the dual subDDbases, crediting subscribers and prospectives with finds. The Trapezzi girls were diligent workers, and if they ever exasperated Cohen it was only because they failed to understand that the work they were doing could be done anywhere and at any time. Though the business’s first major purchases were two computers Cohen set up in the Trapezzis’ unit, Salvatrice persisted in arriving at Unit 26 at 09:00 promptly, and Heather in arriving at 17:00, on Mondays through Fridays [I AM TYPING OUT A SCHEDULE]. They couldn’t be persuaded to use anything other than the same mongrel workstation of Abs’s design [SUCK MY FUCKING BALLZZZ].

But neither Cohen nor de Groeve nor O’Quinn was content with being a publisher. Semesters came and went and gradschool was deferred. The Microsoft offers were off the table. With the Trapezzi girls now taking care of the business — entering data, updating the site and the emails, regularly checking for deadlinks, even taking over the print edition’s layout and negotiations with the printers, and then hiring employees #26–30, Heather’s classmates, to canvass the Bay soliciting subscribers — Cohen, de Groeve, and O’Quinn spent 1995 developing the algorithm.

This equation would become the foundation of Tetration. It was mapped out on paper by Cohen, and [coded] by his partners in two [programming] languages, Python and Java.

Its first iteration found application as an internal searchengine, which allowed the Trapezzis to find any link by name, category, domain, date listed, and user contributor.

Its second iteration was embedded in the site itself, though its appearance there was unfindable—it was not for external use. At this stage — mid-1995—the algorithm was set to track any link to Diatessaron, to follow it back to its origin page and determine whether it was listed or not. If not, the page would now be listed, and would be linked from Diatessaron, though none of this would happen automatically but rather required approval and manual inclusion, due to “a Biblical swarm of quashless bugs” that caused the algorithm to confuse incoming and outgoing urls of the same name but at [different domains], resulting in a failure to relate individual urls with their [hosting sites] , “and that does not even take into account the equifails as like disk crash.”

This type of autosearch — in which an algorithm, conceived of as a “bot,” or “drone,” would “crawl,” or “creep,” “crustaceate,” or “spider”—required an increase in computing power, which, at the time, was expensive. July 1995, they took the site offline and sold their contributor elist [FOR HOW MUCH AND TO WHOM? I AM WRITING ABOUT A MAN WHO SOLD A LIST!!!!] to a new emarketing firm called Schlogistics , whose CEO, Randy Schloger, would marry Heather Trapezzi.With that income and the proceeds [HOW MUCH MONEY AGAIN? BECAUSE I MOTHERFUCKING CARE!!!!@#$%] from the last four editions of the Diatessaron, Cohen, de Groeve, and O’Quinn bought three Ultra Enterprises and three Intel Pentiums, both loaded [right word?] with Linux, which they racked [right word?] in the maintenance shed below Cohen’s unit. The Trapezzis refused to accept any rent for the shed [but weren’t they just the management, not ownership?], so Cohen drafted an agreement on the back of a Shell gas station receipt [though at which point did he or anyone else get a car?], giving the accommodating couple a 1 % stake in whatever resulted, subsequently turning them into multimillionaires , which is why today “ ‘Super’ Sal Trapezzi” is still listed on Tetration’s About page, and even in SEC filings, as “Head Janitor 4 Life.”

Raffaella Trapezzi set about cleaning out the shed, and Super Sal, assisted by Salvatrice’s husband, insurance adjuster Ronnie Giudice (later the impresario behind Ronnie G’s Best Braciole, which had?number locations by?date), constructed makeshift desks, bolting extra warped unit doors atop sawhorses. Following Cohen’s specifications they lightproofed the one window with flypaper, soundproofed the entirety by covering the walls with layers of bubblewrap atop vivisected eggcartons, and partitioned it in particleboard, with Cohen requesting that his own cubicle in the very center be boarded from floor to ceiling to create an enclosed shaft [how would he have gotten in and out?], though he was never to be found there [because there was no way to get in or out?], and preferred to work upstairs, in Unit 26, which he called “The Brumbellum,” “The Brain,” and later “The Fourth and a Half Estate,” and then “Getit D-Unit.”

By early 1996, they were set — they had everything but a name.

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from the Palo Alto sessions: It was as like a dream. Or hallucination. As like when the comp digirecorder shuts off when its condenser mic does not detect our speaking voice for 1, 2, 3, 4 seconds and so the recording will become nothing but an artificially compressed memory omitting the time in which life is lived, the times of blankness between the redlit sesshs just lost and irretrievable. That is how we perceive that existence today, as like a vast unrecorded emptiness. We were not sleeping and not awake. We were convinced that we were writing everything wrong and had gotten everything uncombobulated, that we were writing the algy as like it were the businessplan, and writing the businessplan as like it were the algy. The algy a sequence of specific commands executing specific operations, the bplan a sequence of nonspecific goals and objectives or just subjective projections that would execute only if we failed to convince the VCs, or worse, if we succeeded at failing them totally. The algy used sequences of numbers to represent functions, the bplan used sequences of letters to represent the dysfunctionality of its intended readership, manipulating prospective investors according to sociocultural filters and career trajectories, levels of greed and their enabling inadequacies, significant degrees of gullibility too, or just plain unadulterated stupeyness.

We had set a full functionality deadline of September 1996 but we were behind schedule by April so we revised for December, but then it was May and we were behind the revised schedule. If stage 2 completion was unfeasible we would redefine and make that completion stage 1 so that everything was feasible. The aim was not to be workable. Not to be presentable. But to achieve seamless genius, no raphe. Only the rec investors say done is better than perfect. The techs say perfect is better than done. We were blessed, in that we had no rec investors and were the tech itself. We were always prodding, nudging one another subtle with our fists. Cull would say, “Cunts do not drip on deadline.” Qui would say, “It is too difficult to coordinate the squirts.” We talked as like this even with the girls around, and the girls were always around, The Friends of the Trapezzi Sisters nerfing it up and tossing the frisbee indoors and the only way to get rid of them was to send them out on errands, or if they had a date. “No that is not the correct surge protector, and no we do not have exact change.” Qui and Cull asked all of them out and the answer was, “But you never change your pants.”