By John Markoff, from Machines of Loving Grace, out this month from Ecco Books. Markoff has been a technology and business reporter for the New York Times since 1988.
Bill Duvall grew up on the peninsula south of San Francisco. The son of a physicist who was involved in classified research at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a military-oriented think tank, Duvall attended UC Berkeley in the mid-1960s; he took all the university’s computer-programming courses and dropped out after two years. When he joined the think tank where his father worked, a few miles from the Stanford campus, he was…
