Calvin West was born and raised in the Texas Metroplex on Earth, but his drawl has faded with the time he's spent away from home in recent years.  His heritage shows, however, in his treatment of women as the "fairer sex."  He was exposed to computers at a young age, which led to his "apprenticeship" to hacker Avi Greenberg.  The two worked in the Hacker Underground for some time before going semi-legit and hiring themselves out as programmers and computer experts.

This led Cal, now known in the Underground as the "Cowboy," and Avi to System Vector, where they were to help prepare the out-of-date system for a System Patch from the World Council System Upkeep Committee.  Something went wrong, however, when viral coding was discovered in the patch, releasing a Class-12 virus named Ünres, who summoned four other lower-level viruses to help quarter the system.  Cowboy and the Vector PO watched as most of the human population of Vector was slaughtered as the rest were Infected or brainwashed by the viruses.  Cowboy was most upset when his partner and mentor Avi was killed by a viral assassin.  Avi's last task was to help Cowboy set a Mousetrap around the system so the viruses wouldn't escape.  Almost a year passed as the Principal Office remained the only portion of the system not infected.

Rescue came in the form of a mercenary team led by Nathan Justice.  With Cowboy's help, Justice's team killed each and every virus, then discovered the viral coding that released Ünres was written by a masked hacker named Chaotis.  The Mousetrap was deactivated and Vector returned to Net access.  Shortly thereafter, Government programmers arrived and Cowboy took his leave, but being financially destitute, he was forced to move around a lot to find a cheap place to stay.

Cowboy ran into Justice and his team several more times, once in Mainframe to help them with a job, and then was summoned to the Supercomputer to help stop Chaotis from destroying the Metaverse through a hack in the weather-controlling programming.  This last task allowed Cowboy to go completely legit, being employed by the Teracomputer for his skills.  Cowboy remains on bad terms, however, with "Hacker Enemy Number One," Senator Albert Brosky.

Cowboy earned his name from his attire -- which includes black steel-soled and steel-toed cowboy boots and a black Stetson hat.  He wears blue clothing under his light-colored long wool coat and has longish black hair.  He also has a few hairs on his chin where he's constantly trying to grow a beard.