Computers: Forty Days and Forty Nights

When Michael Wise sits down at a keyboard, he never knows when he will get up. The plump, bearded computer programmer often works twelve, 24, even 36 hours without a break, filling a green screen at the San Rafael, Calif., offices of Broderbund Software with words and numbers that only he and his computer completely understand. Since December, Wise has written 40,000 lines of instructions for a video game he calls Captain Goodnight, after the old Captain Midnight radio series. By the time the program is ready for release this summer, it will have grown to 50,000 lines and swallowed up...

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