My fellow students there were very smart, but the really novel thing was that they actually seemed to put a lot of effort into their school work. By the end of my first semester there, I began to get into that habit as well.

Keep everything in perspective if you wish to be happy. For example... Losing an arm is more an inconvenience than a catastrophe. Things could be a lot worse so why not be grateful they aren't and thereby happy rather than sad?

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.

With every passing year, BEC proves that it still has surprises left for us.

Most of my teachers probably found I made less trouble if they let me read.

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.