his passion for what was new, his determination to do something that had never been done before, and his commitment to the most advanced technology,

Making a game, writing code, for Carmack, was increasingly becoming an exercise in elegance: how to write something that achieved the desired effect in the cleanest way possible.

No place on earth is more baby-boomerish than Silicon Valley, and Jobs was its avatar: a CEO who wore jeans and emitted a “reality distortion field,” a sentimental, countercultural romantic who was also a ruthless mogul, a forever-young tinkerer dedicated to erasing the old distinctions between tools and toys, work and play.