The Early Years

I was born on Okinawa (now part of Japan) in 1963. I spent kindergarten through second grade in Arlington, VA. Third grade in Mannheim, Germany. Fourth through sixth grade in Vicenza, Italy. Seventh through ninth back in Arlington, VA. Tenth through twelfth in Seattle.

In ninth grade, I started getting interested in computers. My Junior High in Virginia had a teletype connected to a 300 baud modem in a little room off the library. This, in turn was connected to a remote HP 2000 computer. It had a simple BASIC interpreter. I got out of every class I could (such as shop classes) to go do stuff on the computer.

We moved before tenth grade, and the new school in Washington State only had a Dec PDP-8, a much less sophisticated computer; 10K of memory, of which the BASIC interpreter took 8K.

During the summer between tenth and eleventh grade, my father bought a Radio Shack model I computer. Black and white screen, 32K of memory, two floppy disk drives. I programmed on this almost every day.

Eventually, I started writing programs for other people. One program I wrote was to do pairings for a mixed doubles tennis tournament for the local racquet club.