The Creative Process:
“Computer Gardening Made Simple”
How I Became an Entrepreneur
I got mono in the winter of my junior year in college, and while all my friends continued with the ski trip we had planned, I stayed home in Florida and wondered if I was gonna die. The fever was bad and I remember hallucinating through the long nights.
One of the hallucinations was vivid. I had been taking an engineering course in computer circuit design (EN 163) and in it Professor Bulterman referred to chips as “the seeds of computers.” And somehow this got me imagining that if you planted those chips you could grow something. It was 1984 — the Apple Macintosh computer was being released, further extending my agricultural thoughts — and in that moment in my childhood home I uncovered a weird little paperback publication released by the USDA: “Vegetable Gardening in Florida.” It was 60 cheap pages with bad photos, and in very matter-of-fact language it explained how to generate seedlings and plant tomatoes and grow beans and so on.
With nothing else to do, I wondered if I could just swap out the instructions and make it into a handbook for growing… computers. I asked my parents if they thought I should produce a satirical little book. My mom, ever the practical entrepreneur, said that if I could come up with five solid…
