On the other hand, I did love classes in computer architecture and assembly language, so maybe I just needed to wait to get into it. On the third hand, I’m glad I don’t spend my days programming in assembly!

Anyway, Wizardry and Ultima sucked up a huge amount of free time back in the day, too. I enjoyed the complexity of Wizardry, but I don’t recall whether it had an eventual goal, or was just a lot of fighting and treasure-finding. The Ultima games did have goals, and I enjoyed working towards those.

The next year, the junior high got a grant and bought a bunch of PETs to replace the one VAX terminal they had, so I learned BASIC on the Commodore PET. (Somewhere I still have a list of useful PEEKs and POKEs which could be used to overwrite permanent memory.) I also got curious about the VAX and learned how to use it to play Trek73 – and connect to the UofM mainframe to run more complicated programs.

In 1981 we got an Apple II+ and I learned about disk operating systems and how to write my own, and put it on a floppy so I could boot the computer with it. I also ran into the limits of memory and had to alter my programs so that instead of looping from 1 to 10 I had to loop from 1 to 7 :<)

That Christmas, we got to pick two games for the computer. We took Microsoft Olympic Decathalon and Wizardry. Wizardry quickly ate up most of my friends’ free time as we played it. We also quickly discovered it was written in Pascal – and there were decompilers available. The game and its data were copy-protected … so we quickly learned about copy-protection as well. (Turns out that several programs depended on the disk drive’s spin rate and the drives had a small tuning screw; by turning it a small amount you could allow the cracker program to read enough data to determine the coded spin rate and use that to decrypt the program. Nibble counts for the win :<) In order to hack the game, you had to know how the data was laid out on disk, and what the data meant, so we learned.

Then I got to MIT and began a formal computer science education. I had discovered that I didn’t meet the height requirements for an astronaut, but still was interested in space and aircraft, so aeronautical engineering it was. That required a lot of EE and CS, so I ended up with a double major in CS and Avionics. (I was originally going for a triple with EE but was persuaded by Jordan that the extra course during senior year in something I really wasn’t interested in wasn’t worth it. Good advice, as it happened.)

(My CS thesis was on converting X Windows programs from low-level X calls to the (new at the time) X Toolkit, which insulated a lot of the gory graphics details from users.)

Then I went to grad school for aircraft control and dynamics, but bailed out in 1991 at the height of the collapse of the aircraft industy. When I found myself competing for jobs with PhDs who’d been working in the industry for ten years, I started looking for jobs anywhere else. I invested $25 to list my resume in the MIT alumni database and ended up getting pinged by Canon Information Systems (a subdivision of Canon, Inc. doing their NeXT programming for them); my Master’s thesis was written on the NeXT, so would I be interested in a job there?

That got me to California and NeXTStep programming, and after two years into NeXT itself, and then into Apple. It’s a relatively far cry from the astronaut/avionics engineer I was pushing for at 10, but it’s treated me quite well.

I really kind of backed into software development as well. I was only a minor hacker or recreational programmer – my neighbor across the street actually wrote and distributed games for the Apple II with some success, among them a version of Tempest before the arcade game became popular! – and don’t really do a bunch of recreational programming, except as it relates to my other hobbies (i.e. I write programs to keep track of books, Magic cards, calculate baseball statistics, etc.). Computers were really just a minor focus for an insatiably curious kid who loved learning lots of things to answer one question.