In the midst of a new school, having recently left my undergraduate institution, I’ve been relatively nostalgic. I remember my family getting its first computer. It was a Compaq, running just a few MHz, but when my father came home one night with it, it seemed positively magical. I had heard of computers, and seen them at school, but nothing beyond Oregon Trail.

You could change the text of the screen saver, and its font, color, etc. This, I was sure, was awesome.

I was in the fifth grade at this point, and several weeks later my parents were meeting with their accountant in the kitchen. I saw mysterious black box in front of the man that turned out to be a laptop. He was staring at it intently, but from where I was I could see nothing on the screen - viewing angles just weren’t what they are today. I slinked around and tried to catch a glimpse, but I was noticed and my parents remarked on my curiosity saying that I had never seen one before. Slightly embarrassed, I scurried off as children do.

By the time I was in high school, I had learned about Napster, and torrents, and had learned a small amount about the hardware. I bought my first hard drive (120 GB) for about US$100, and though it’s large compared to the 16MB disks of yore, looking back it still seems ridiculously tiny.

I eventually started playing with C++ my junior year, helped out by my friend Michael’s mother, Katja. She was a programmer (and perhaps she still is) at Ball Aerospace, and she helped me to install Cygwin and get a compiler running. At last, I could actually compile and run the code I had been reading about in the books I had picked up from the local library.

I was constantly aware of the differences between my programs and those of the system, an obvious difference in quality and found it easy to lose interest because of the lack of a GUI. All the same, the power was obvious, and it was then that I first became interested in mathematical curiosities like prime numbers and Fibonacci.

When I left for school, I imagined that I might end up in computer science, but I initially registered as an electrical engineer. When I found myself taking more CS courses than EE, I switched and embraced it. Still, I can’t help but wonder about nature vs. nurture and what along the way (besides the obvious) pushed me in that direction. Either way, I do not regret my career choice, and I can’t think of anything else I’d be so regularly inspired to work on.