The Excitement Begins

As a kid, I never owned a radio control car for more than a year without disassembling it and trying to figure out how it works. It probably didn't help that my father was an electronics engineer. I never figured it out, but I always managed to break it beyond all possibility of repair. In fact, a huge number of toys that I owned ended up suffering from a terrible disassembly.

When I was eight years old, I started building model kits. Snap-Tite cars at first, but I moved into more complex models. I never could get the H.M.S. Bounty complete, but I broke one of the fragile plastic sails. I was able to build something, without breaking something else.

I've been interested in computers since the fourth grade. A friend of my family had purchased an Atari 400 with a cassette data reader. At first, like most kids, I was amazed by the games but soon, I got curious about how it worked.

I have no idea the technical side of what he did, but he showed me the source-code for a game - it was a game where a chicken ran back and forth across the screen, trying to catch eggs. For all I know, he could have shown me the code for anything, and told me it was for the game, but to me he had shown me what was under the hood.

I never got to explore that computer beyond a few sessions while I tried this poor guy's patience. I was insatiably curious, and always considered myself everyone's equal. I wasn't exactly a typically well-behaved child that way. The excitement of "seeing" what was under the hood for that first time has been with me ever since.