My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother taught high school English.

I certainly remember building model rockets. It was fun to watch the rocket blast into the air, suspenseful to wonder if the parachute would open to bring the rocket safely back.

The 1970s, the decade of my teenage years, was a transitional period in American youth culture.

After a semester or so, my infatuation with computers burnt out as quickly as it had begun.

My head was always bubbling over with facts and it seems to me this had little to do with my paying close attention in school and more to do with my voracious and omnivorous reading habits.

Between rounds of speed chess I read enough of a programming manual to teach myself to write programs on the school's DEC mainframe in the language Basic.

I was born in Palo Alto, California in 1961.