Crazy Fish May Redefine Computer Industry

"I brought the most money," Fish says with his crazy laugh. He has not had a girlfriend for years, he says, not wanting to confuse his son with a "temporary mama."

A pack rat, Fish thumbs through old index cards with his ideas for inventions, the columns he wrote about education for a black newspaper in Austin, the business plan of a company he started in 1999 called Viametrix.

From one box, Fish pulls out a small T-shirt and a pair of sneakers, which his son wore when he won his first race. He tenderly removes each item and tells its story, then opens a tiny box: baby teeth put under pillows long ago.

After making his deal with Falk and Nanotronics, Fish had put the first payment, about $1 million, into a trust fund for Tommy's education. No income, no big deal. Even in flush times Fish had never spent much on himself.

"You wouldn't know if Russell had $100 in the bank or $100 million in the bank," says running buddy Ben Goldfarb. "I'm trying to talk him into buying a new car. He won't do it."

Fish's "retirement" meant he could concentrate on his passion: educating minority children. In 1997, he filed a lawsuit against DISD to get records of children's scores on diagnostic tests, used by the district to identify weak teachers. He contends that the worst teachers end up at poor inner-city schools where a few bad teachers in a row can condemn a child to a life of illiteracy. After a trial, Fish lost his fight when the district argued it would violate students' privacy.

But it inspired him to form the Open Records Project. The plan was to post public information on a Web site Fish created for the Dallas Examiner, an African-American community paper. It was one version of his grandfather's motto, "no law without light."

In 1998, Fish was approached about putting sex offender names and addresses on the Internet. After a long legal fight with the Texas Department of Public Safety and help from the Texas Attorney General, in April 1999 the "Texas Sex Offender Database" became the first free database of its kind in the country.

Fish says that by June, the Examiner's server was crashing several times a day. The traffic peaked in December 1999, at more than a million queries a day. He claims it was among the top 10 most accessed Web sites in the nation. Most states now post sex offender databases.

Kendall Clark, now working in artificial intelligence, encountered Fish at a meeting of people interested in the free software movement and free access to public information. He worked on the ORP.

"We bonded over that," Clark says. "Fish is a really smart guy. He was in the right place at the right time."

Clark calls Fish a good model for how geeks can be activists. Maybe geeks with money—problem-solvers, outside-the-box thinkers—will revolutionize the world of philanthropy. Because Fish is now what he calls "little rich," Don Quixote with money and a laptop.

On September 15, 1998, Fish was awarded a patent for a "High Performance Microprocessor Having Variable Speed System Clock." The Fish Clock.

In 2006, Fish filed a lawsuit against San Diego-based Patriot Scientific, which had acquired Nanotronics, for non-payment of royalties. Fish negotiated an agreement giving Patriot the right to license his portfolio of patents. (Fish received six patents from work he'd done in 1989.) In return, Fish agreed to provide proof that even though Moore's name was on the documents, Fish was the sole inventor of the clock and several other designs.

That set off a maze of suits and countersuits. But in May, Fish settled with Patriot.

Immediately Patriot filed lawsuits for patent infringement against Sony, Fujitsu, Toshiba, Matsushita and others seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. Patriot contends that every computer chip that operates at speeds above 120 megahertz—meaning every PC manufactured after 1994 or 1995—has a Fish clock and the "multi-instruction fetch," another Fish patent.

To date, Patriot Scientific has sued more than 150 computer/semiconductor companies. Twenty-five, including AMD, Hewlett-Packard, Casio and Fujitsu, have agreed to license the patent; Intel alone paid $20 million. The litigation may be just beginning. Patriot CEO Wallin said, "We see this as applying equally to medical equipment, commercial equipment and other mass-produced consumer products."

Bottom line: "If you make a computer, you have to use my patent," Fish says. "This is the wheel."

When retired Apple executive Patrick O'Sullivan saw Russell Hamilton Fish III in the middle of a crowd of children in Kenya this July, he was struck by the look on his face.

"I have a photograph of Russell laughing in Africa, and it's real," O'Sullivan says. "It's joy. There are hundreds of children around him shouting his name. I would say it reveals his true self. Deep down—he will deny this—he's an emotional man but the engineer covers it up."

Earlier this year, after reading about Build African Schools, a nonprofit O'Sullivan set up, Fish contacted him.

"It was like an interrogation," O'Sullivan says. "Being the engineer he is, Russell wanted to know all the details. You can't do anything normal with Russell. He'll say, 'If I give you money, what 14 things are you going to do with the school?' My God, it's endless."