I’ve been a technology and science geek my whole life. Watching Star Trek as a kid had a huge influence on me.
I was a member of a small-town science fiction club and one of the members brought to a meeting a new gadget in 1978: A Commodore PET personal computer. It was amazing.
A few years later in high school they got several Apple II+ computers and I was in one of the very first programming classes learning how to program these things in BASIC. I was hooked.
Luckily my parents saw the potential of these new gadgets and were able to buy me my very own Apple II with an 80-column card, a floppy drive, and an Epson MX-80 dot-matrix printer. To say this was life-changing would be an understatement.
My parents were middle-class and back then a personal computer was an extravagant expense. I’m very grateful they saw the value and were able to make it happen.
For the rest of high school and through college I had the Apple and leveraged it and my programming skills to help learn all kinds of things. I wrote a program to graph math functions and do calculus. I wrote a simple CAD program to do technical drawings and learned basic I/O programming using a joystick for input.
After college I sold the computer and it was still worth enough to finance my move to California to see how far I could take this computer thing.
That worked out nicely.
Here’s a few pictures over the years:
My group at an Autodesk Leadership Training offsite in 1998: