PERSONAL HISTORY
The Apple II Changed My Life
Thank you, Steve Wozniak. Thank you, Steve Jobs.
There’s a scene in Apollo 13 where Tom Hanks, who starred as astronaut Jim Lovell, describes how phosphorescent algae saved him from having to ditch his F-2H Banshee in the ocean:
I’m thinking about ditching in the ocean and I look down there and in the darkness, there’s this green trail, it’s like a long carpet that just laid out right beneath me. It was the algae. It was that phosphorescent stuff that gets churned up in the wake of a big ship and it was just leading me home. If my cockpit lights hadn’t shorted out, there’s no way I’d ever have been able to see that. You never know what events are going to transpire to get you home.
For me, instead of phosphorescent algae, it was The Apple II computer, and the home it led me to forty years ago was software engineering.
Fate Comes Walking In
I had grown up in a rough-and-tumble blue-collar neighborhood on the north shore of Staten Island. With that as my starting point, I didn’t have far to fall, hitting bottom before my nineteenth birthday. In an act of desperation, I joined the Army Field Artillery as a Lance Missile Crew Member, hoping to fund a college education.
