My uncle Mike worked for a company called Honeywell designing tracking systems for nuclear missiles, or maybe it was answering phones--in my memory, it was missles--and anything tech-related we ever had as kids came from him. I remember when he asked us to drive him to the store to buy socks and he came out with a microwave, which had just been invented and which we were all a little afraid of.

Another time, he brought us an Apple IIe, one of those green screen early PC's and said: "this is the future." I wondered a bit why we stored "the future" in the attic and I don't remember if you could do anything with it: Oregon Trail, maybe. Soon, I learned Basic programming language from some friends at school. We would make backslashes have sword fights before going out to recess and having our own. It helped probably that we lived in the Pacific Northwest, where people's dads might have worked at early tech companies, but apart from that exposure in around fourth grade, computers didn't really figure in my life again until college, when suddenly we had to type papers.