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I am a longtime lover of robots. The ones that first captured my heart were not those famous ones in Star Wars. My interest was stimulated watching Silent Running. Those bots were cool!

Childhood

I have a long history of electonic circuit building. I soldered my first circuit, a bicycle speedometer, together when I was in fourth grade. It used magnets attached to the spokes of the bike and a magnetic reed switch to sense them. After that I was hooked. Not having the actual knowledge of circuitry, I used to use modelling clay and ring boxes to make secret spy transmitters (the circuits being made of clay, of course). One day I was watching Nickelodeon, and saw a show on computers (I think it was talk show called Livewire). The computers were doing graphics and I immediately told my father that I wanted a computer. I really wanted to know what 2+2 looked like. Some time later, after much begging from me and my siblings, he bought an Atari 800 complete with floppy and tape drives. WOW! It was awesome! The power! BWAAA HA HA HA!!!

Imaging my dissapointment when I found out that 2+2 yeilds a straight, boring, line.

Adolescence

Promptly I taught myself BASIC. Two other friends parents bought them computers. The got TRS-80s. We were minor dieties now. We wrote text adventure games. One friend got an Apple IIe. Graphics were now advanced. No more ASCII art! The computer age was upon us and we were racing ahead. Our middle school decided to start computer classes. Unfortunately, the teacher didn't know much about computers, so we taught her. She was a good student. Wisely, the school purchased Apples and we were soon writing animated graphics. I recall I wrote a firework display in an amazing 16 colors!

My father, becoming an entrepreneur, decided to get involved with payphones. He knew of my love of computers and my programming so asked me to write something that would be able to download and interpret phone data from computerized pay phones. I taught myself Pascal and had a test program that had two windows. In one window, raw data would scroll by, in the second window, that same data would be interpreted.

Highschool

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