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to know, what I needed to build the equipment—and then I built the radio. It gave me a lot of confidence for doing all kinds of other projects later on.
So my dad ended up being a key influence here, too. I mean, he even got his ham radio license with me—studying with me and taking and passing the test! The thing is, he never really tried to lead me in any direction or push me into electrical engineering. But whenever I got interested in something he was right there, always ready to show me on his blackboard how something worked. He was always ready to teach me something.
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My mom really pushed me along, too. In the third grade, when I started doing math flash cards at school, my mom practiced multiplication with me the night before we'd have to do them in school. And as a result, in school I was the only boy who
could beat the girls at them. I remember a teacher said, "Wow, that's incredible. I never had a boy before who could beat the girls at flash cards." And again, that was high praise. Girls always seemed to get better grades than boys, I thought. And then I thought: Whoa. My gosh, I'm good at something—math—and I'm going to work harder at it. And I worked harder and harder to try to always be the best, to try to always be ahead. That's what really put me ahead at such a young age, this drive to keep my lead. I had a teacher in both the fourth and fifth grades, Miss Skrak, who really praised my science projects, like I was the smartest kid in the class because I knew science so well. As you'd predict,
I accelerated even more later on. In sixth grade I was doing electronics projects most kids never figure out how to do even in high school-level electronics. So I was very lucky with all my teachers, especially Miss Skrak. She came along at just the right time in my life.
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At about this time, there was another lucky accident. I found this article about computers in one of the old engineering journals my dad had hanging around. Back then, back in 1960, writing about computers wasn't common at all. But what I saw was an article about the ENIAC and a picture of it. The ENIAC— which stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer—was the first true computer by most people's definition. It was designed to calculate bomb trajectories for the military during World War II. So it was designed back in the 1940s.
This journal had all kinds of pictures of huge computers and articles describing them. These computers were unlike anything I'd ever seen. One picture showed a big round tube that looked like a TV tube. And the article explained that the round tube was where these huge computers stored data. It used phosphor lights and then it could read if the phosphors (lights) were on or off— just like the digits 1 and 0 on today's computers can be interpreted as On or Off—and then it could reset them quickly. This, the article explained, was actually a way to store data, and I was just intrigued by that idea. I was about eleven years old at the time.
Suddenly I realized that some incredible things were just starting to happen with computers at these very early stages. Of course, they were nowhere near the point of making computers affordable or usable for the world. They weren't even talking about a point where anyone could buy a computer and put it in your house and learn how to use it yourself. I thought that would be just the best thing, and that was the dream—The Dream, I
have to put that in capital letters—because it was the single force that drove me for years afterward. How to make The Dream come true. I thought about that constantly.
There were so many incredible things happening with computers at that time, and I would never have known about them if I hadn't been too shy to do anything but read magazines at my house. The amazing thing was that at this early stage in my life, I'd managed to find this journal Dad had with this stuff in it. This was a magazine most people were never