How I Got Here

I used my first computer in the late 1970’s. There was a cassette tape for saving BASIC programs. When you wanted to update your work you had to rewind the tape, hit record, then enter the save command on the PC. The screen had two colors, black and green. My elementary school had two of them.

A few years later my brother and I would go to the public library with a box of 5 1/4 floppy discs and the latest computer game magazine. We would take turns transcribing and debugging lines of code to play the game of the month. We also had copies of Street Fighter and Castle Wolfenstein 3D. Those hours spent hunting down typos in printed code were my first real lessons in debugging.

I tried to build on that foundation by taking computer programming classes at a community college, but the academic style didn’t fit me and I dropped out. Without much direction, I ended up hitchhiking. During the last trip I found myself in Tucson, broke and homeless, standing in a Red Cross food line. While waiting, I overheard someone say the best thing in life was to lay under a tree all day doing nothing. That stopped me cold. That is not who I am. I decided to stop drifting and start building something, so I went to work in restaurants and committed to working my way up.

A few years later, one of my managers noticed I was good with computers and suggested I try to change careers. I applied to a few places and came up empty. Then one day in 1995 I walked into a record store and asked if they were hiring. The clerk mentioned they were looking to start an online catalog to sell T-shirts. On my way home I stopped at a bookstore and picked up a couple of “Teach Yourself HTML” books. Not having a computer at home, I used a typewriter to practice the format. I got the job. The record store went out of business a few months later, but by then I had learned enough to land another job building computers and setting up LAN networks.