college and got
distracted by drugs sex and rock and roll, like anybody with half a
brain would have then!" After college he was a progressive-rock DJ in
Hartford, Connecticut, for a couple of years.

I ask him if he ever misses his rock and roll days--if he ever wished
he could go back to radio work.

He shakes his head flatly. "I stopped thinking about going back to be
a DJ the day after Altamont."

Kapor moved to Boston in 1974 and got a job programming mainframes in
COBOL. He hated it. He quit and became a teacher of transcendental
meditation. (It was Kapor's long flirtation with Eastern mysticism
that gave the world "Lotus.")

In 1976 Kapor went to Switzerland, where the Transcendental Meditation
movement had rented a gigantic Victorian hotel in St-Moritz. It was an
all-male group--a hundred and twenty of them--determined upon
Enlightenment or Bust. Kapor had given the transcendant his best shot.
He was becoming disenchanted by "the nuttiness in the organization."
"They were teaching people to levitate," he says, staring at the floor.
His voice drops an octave, becomes flat. "THEY DON'T LEVITATE."

Kapor chose Bust. He went back to the States and acquired a degree in
counselling psychology. He worked a while in a hospital, couldn't
stand that either. "My rep was," he says "a very bright kid with a
lot of potential who hasn't found himself. Almost thirty. Sort of
lost."

Kapor was unemployed when he bought his first personal computer--an
Apple II. He sold his stereo to raise cash and drove to New Hampshire
to avoid the sales tax.

"The day after I purchased it," Kapor tells me, "I was hanging out in a
computer store and I saw another guy, a man in his forties,
well-dressed guy, and eavesdropped on his conversation with the
salesman. He didn't know anything about computers. I'd had a year
programming. And I could program in BASIC. I'd taught myself. So I
went up to him, and I actually sold myself to him as a consultant." He
pauses. "I don't know where I got the nerve to do this. It was
uncharacteristic. I just said, 'I think I can help you, I've been
listening, this is what you need to do and I think I can do it for
you.' And he took me on! He was my first client! I became a computer
consultant the first day after I bought the Apple II."

Kapor had found his true vocation. He attracted more clients for his
consultant service, and started an Apple users' group.

A friend of Kapor'