Dead man was tech pioneer

Alex Breitler

Published: September 26, 2003 in Biography

INGOT -- It had been 15 years since Todd Fischer heard from his old co-worker Bruce Van Natta.

Then came a mysterious email.

The Dec. 9, 2001, note was brief, giving only the slightest idea of the life computer visionary Van Natta had been leading in the woods of eastern Shasta County.

"You can't contact me on the net," Van Natta explained. "Or by phone, as I am a hermit that lives 30 miles deep into the hills of Nor Cal.

"No phone, no net, no people."

Just the way Van Natta liked it.

The 58-year-old silver-haired recluse was found dead Saturday inside a shack on his 10-acre ridgetop property near Ingot. He'd been shot more than once.

To friends and family, it was a less than fitting end for a man acclaimed for helping lead the foray into personal computing in the mid-1970s.

"Bruce was a very brilliant and underestimated individual," Fischer said Thursday from his home near Sacramento. "He was also probably very complex and bore more personal demons than most of us would imagine."

No arrests have been reported. A neighbor says Van Natta had been worried recently about the safety of a family that had been staying on his property and had wanted to leave with them.

Spending a decade of his life at the end of a long dirt road must have been unfathomable in 1974 as Van Natta attended graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley. He got a job with fledgling IMS Associates Inc. -- the same company that would eventually blossom into nationwide franchise chain Computerland.

In 1975, inside a small building in San Leandro, the tiny IMS staff developed a microcomputer later made famous in Matthew Broderick's film "War Games."

Van Natta and others "spent many long nights around a restaurant table, trying to envision the way the future would change as a result of the personal computer," said co-worker Phil Reed.

Van Natta's contributions "ignited our imaginations," Reed said.

More questionable is what ignited such extreme change in Van Natta -- what led him to withdraw from the society he knew, even as his co-workers became millionaires.

Fischer said he noticed a change when Van Natta became involved in the "est" movement, led by Werner Erhard. The self-improvement seminars promised a fresh outlook on life and instilled discipline in part by prohibiting participants from using the restroom.

When Van Natta emerged after a weekend seminar, he seemed a different person, Fischer said.

"He had gone through major change from an excitable, temperamental at times and introverted individual, to this suddenly falsely mellow, falsely in-control person. He almost seemed to be impersonating something we knew he wasn't."

Faced with lots of competition, the company was declining, and Van Natta's first marriage was ending. Van Natta worked for five years developing a best-selling word processing program, left that company with a large sum of money and purchased land in Shasta County.

Larry Back remembers the day the shiny Lexus crawled up bumpy Backbone Road.

As the years passed, the neighbors became great friends, working together to maintain the road and cruising over winter snow with all-terrain vehicles.

Van Natta was an odd-looking character, Back admits, with his white dress shirt, long hair, glasses, blue jeans and slip-on shoes.

He never talked much about his career in computers.

"I think it was something he was probably glad to leave behind," Back said. "It was a more fast-paced life and he liked the simple life up here."

Van Natta also had an irregular heart rhythm and had been urged by a doctor to avoid stress.

He seized on an urge to help the less fortunate, inviting families to stay in shacks and trailers on his land, paying parents to do odd jobs and making sure their children went to school.

"He was real giving," Back said. "He had kind of a rough exterior. He didn't have huge people skills. He would turn a lot of people off because of that.

"He would say, 'If you can hang with me for a year, you'll like me.'"

Once Van Natta was beaten by drug addicts whom he'd taken in, Back said.

Violence struck him again less than a week ago.

Back saw Van Natta on Friday night and said he'd been planning to leave with one of his families because he feared for their safety.

"He just unfortunately didn't leave soon enough," Back said.

The next morning, residents on his property ran down the hill screaming for Back to call 911. They'd found Van Natta's body.

On Thursday, his brother Byron continued to cope with his brother's death.

Van Natta grew up in Eugene, Ore., with four siblings. He attended the University of Oregon where he earned a degree in computer science, said Byron Van Natta.

"It just fit right in with his interest in math," the victim's brother said. "He would sit and read about quantum physics as a hobby," and he subscribed to 35 scientific journals.

Last September, Bruce Van Natta was suddenly inspired to walk the California coast from Eureka to San Francisco, and he did it, his brother said.

He had two grown sons, with whom he'd recently re-established a relationship.

"I truly believe Bruce was a great man," his brother said.

He said he knows little about the sheriff's investigation, though he knew there "were some problems with some people up there."

"Hopefully we can get this to an end and get somebody off the street before they hurt somebody else," he said.

Reporter Alex Breitler can be reached at 225-8344 or at abreitler@redding.com.