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The brothers declined to discuss their father's arrest, except to ask it not be included in the story. "It doesn't define our lives at all," Robert says. "We were just little kids. We had nothing to do with it." Their father rejected an interview request.
Rudy admits he began rebelling against his mother after losing his dad to jail. "I'm an independent person," he says. "I can't live with rules that well."
Despite that adolescent rebelliousness, Rudy excelled at high school. By his senior year, he wore a serious expression and a businessman's no-nonsense haircut, and was active in Future Business Leaders of America. His adviser, Nelly Odio, remembers him as perhaps the best computer whiz to pass through the school. "He was extremely smart, just leaps and bounds above everyone else when it came to computers and programming," she says.
Robert began attending Coral Park High School a year after Rudy. He also stood out in the classroom, Odio says. She remembers Rudy hanging out with a group of smart kids, doing well in class, and even volunteering to design Coral Park's Web site for free. He also worked long hours after school, designing computer systems for businesses around Miami. Rudy declines to name them, but Odio confirms he pulled in serious cash even as a 16-year-old. "He was making tons of money in high school as a computer consultant, probably more than I do today," she says, laughing.
Maria and Rodolfo divorced in 1996, two years before he earned early release from federal prison — a move that only threw the Pedrazas' lives into more disarray. The parents soon began battling over custody of their children, according to court records.
By 2000, Rudy's sophomore year of high school, he had moved out of his mom's house and in with his dad. In 2001, Robert joined them. "Our dad just gave us a lot more freedom to do our thing," Rudy says.
In custody papers, Rodolfo wrote that "verified allegations of child abuse or neglect [had] been made" in the case. Maria denies this in her filings, claiming there had "never been any verbal or physical abuse." She says she allowed Rudy to "live temporarily with his father" in late 2000, but a few weeks later, "it became evident the former husband was not providing a safe, secure, and appropriate home."
The boys mostly stayed with their dad after that. Rudy graduated in 2002 with grades good enough to get him into the University of Florida. "That was the happiest I'd ever seen him, when he got accepted," Odio says.
Robert, in contrast, transferred out of Coral Park after his sophomore year and attended a nearby high school. He never graduated.
Through all the conflict, the brothers realized their passion for computers. In the mid-'90s, they talked their mom into buying a computer. It was a clunky PC that could barely run word processors.
With their mom pulling in only about $600 a week as a legal secretary and their dad struggling to return to life outside the pen, the Pedraza brothers couldn't afford better.
Rudy moved to Gainesville in fall 2002 and enrolled in the University of Florida's college of liberal arts and sciences. His plan was to study computer science, but records show he was an English major. Either way, the point was moot by the end of his sophomore year, when he was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery on his mouth. "I had a serious cancer scare," Rudy says, pointing to the left side of his mouth. Most of his bottom teeth are missing on that side, and he talks with a pronounced lisp. "It shook me up, so I dropped out of school for a while."
By 2005, he was back in Miami, living in a rented one-story house on a quiet street. He and Robert, who had been working as a computer consultant, decided to join forces in a tech firm.
For a year and a half, they worked on small freelance projects. In July 2007, they formally incorporated Psystar Corp. It was a meaningless name, Robert says, adding, "Trust me, in hindsight, I wish we'd picked something people could actually pronounce." (It's pronounced sigh-star.)
They converted Rudy's two-car garage into a home base, filling the space with desks, computers, and — in a back corner — a workshop where Robert could tinker.
In the afternoon rush-hour chaos of the Palmetto Expressway, Rudy Pedraza weaved his Honda through the frantic traffic. He'd been home from college for more than a year. He was recovering well from surgery, though he'd lost a lot of weight.
A pickup truck suddenly flashed into his peripheral vision. Rudy had time only to register that it was barreling across five lanes of traffic toward his passenger-side door. Before he could move the steering wheel, the impact smacked his car off course and sent it careening toward a guardrail.
He glimpsed the 50-foot drop from the overpass and imagined slamming through the fence and plummeting to the ground. He wasn't wearing a seat belt. Just before contact, he braced his arms against the steering wheel and screamed.
The front of the car crumpled like a Styrofoam cup. An airbag exploded into Rudy's face and scalded his arms. His car skidded. Miraculously, it didn't flip. The guardrail held. He survived.
"I still don't know how, honestly," Rudy says. "Adrenaline, I guess. But I can say without a doubt that crash was the moment when Psystar was truly born."
For the previous few months, while the brothers did consulting work for a company that sold storage units, Robert had spent hours of free time at the cluttered table in Rudy's garage. His pet project was Mac's OS X operating system.
The system, whose first version debuted in 1999, is widely considered one of the most user-friendly ever invented. Though the software sold for $100 or less, it was programmed to run only on Mac computers — and the cheapest fully equipped models usually sold for around $1,000, almost three times the price of the cheapest PCs on the market. (Windows, by contrast, can run on nearly every kind of computer, including Macs.)
