Matt – we were practically best pals now – told me to come to the restaurant, where he spoke quickly and quietly: "Heh, you're lucky to know me, man. Listen to his: a computer like the kind we need is expensive, right? There's no way we could afford one, and that would finish our business before we even started! But there is another way: it's how all important services start up in universities – by the way, Google was born in a university! We need to network loads of cheap computers!"

He explained that every four or five years generations change in video game consoles. So Sony's PlayStation was upgraded from the third generation to the fourth, then from the fourth to the fifth, and so on. The whole point was that people dump old ones and buy new ones.

"The fact is..." – and he showed me a video game magazine, with all the screaming colors and characters with dorky himbo faces – "the next PlayStation will be backward-compatible. It means that when someone buys a new console they can also play their old games on it. So the current PlayStation won't be worth shit – they'll sell it for peanuts at consignment stores. And believe me, when DARPA, the US research center, bought a couple hundred, it wasn't to play Tetris with!"

He pulled out a sheet of paper and started crunching some numbers. He said we could start with 100 consoles for testing, then we should keep incrementing their number by fifty. "We'll need 350 consoles for comfortable calculations, ergo, 100,000 billion floating-point operations per second!" I didn't really understand that part.

He looked at me. "So now, buddy, for 100 consoles we need space, ventilation, and power. That's your job."