Mike Sisk: About Me

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I was born in Joplin, Missouri and grew up just a few blocks from Route 66.

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 of me over the years:

The first picture of me with my mom on day 1.

Fishing

Fishing at Stockton Lake, Missouri.

Visting a Saturn V

A Saturn V at the Alabama Space and Rocket Center.

First Computer

My first computer: an Apple IIe.

A Polaroid from a creative writing class in high school.

High School Career Day

High school career day with Matt (left), me (center), and Kevin (right).

High School Reunion

A few years later we were all in town for a high school reunion and tried recreating the photo.

Escaping High School

Escaping High School.

Working as a cave guide on summer break during college.

Trip to Paris

At Notre-Dame de Paris in 1993.

Tahoe Rock Climbing

Rock climbing at Donner Pass.

Alta Peak

On Alta Peak in Sequoia National Park.

First office at Autodesk

My office in AutoCAD Product Support at Autodesk in Sausalito, CA around 1991.

Another office at Autodesk

Another office at Autodesk when I was in the Unix ports and platforms group around 1995. The "tree" is a model Giant Seqouia made from extruded foam over a wire armature with Woodland Scenics foliage.

Yet another office at Autodesk