This time I want to write about why I chose to study engineering. There aren't any real influences in that decision, but I suppose we can go back a bit more. My first video game console was this simple system from Sears which had four games, all based on Pong. There was the basic Pong; Hockey, which was Pong with smaller goals; Racketball, which had both players on one side bouncing the ball off of a common wall; and a solitaire Racketball. Black and white, using a television as the display (with the aid of a converter box), only two paddle controllers and some switches, including an expert mode which made your paddle smaller. I remember playing the games with my mom a lot, and I was about 10 or so.

My next video game system was either going to be an Atari 2600 or a Bally Astrocade. The Bally was a cool system with a numeric keypad (which could also do alphabetic input, though clumsily) and a combination paddle/joystick controller. It used cassettridges, very much like music cassette tapes, which stored a program (mostly games) that was loaded into the machine's memory. For a game system, the cool feature was that it had a Basic interpreter so you could program stuff on it, which is why my parents pushed me to choose it.

Alas, I was more into games, so I chose the popular 2600, which even then had a large number of cartridge games available. An advantage of cartridges is that they load instantly, great when you just want to reset the system and start over immediately. One of my friends had a Vic 20 and it took forever to load games into it. The only big problem were the Atari joysticks, which tended not to last long, hence there was a good third-party market for sturdier joysticks.

In the summer after 7th grade (age 13 or 14), my parents enrolled me in two classes at the local California State University, Sacramento: Latin and Pascal. The classes were designed for smart kids, so they probably weren't as hard as regular college classes. Actually, maybe it was Latin one summer, Pascal the next. In any case, in the Pascal class we used a mainframe computer to write programs, then we ran them in batch mode and had to walk to another building to get the resulting printout.

Two things were to influnce me. One was the internal bulletin board system on the mainframe. Very much like Usenet, the BBS had a lot less people using it but it was popular and I spent a lot of time writing posts. It showed me that computers could be used to communicate with people, a strange concept at that time to me. The other influence was the computer lab next door, which was chock full of Atari 400 and 800 computers. Not only were computer games a lot more fun and involved than the 2600 games, you could actually program on those things and write your own games.

So I convinced my parents to buy me a microcomputer. At the time the popular ones were the Atari 400 and 800 systems, the Apple II, and the Commodore 64. I'm not sure why I chose the Commodore 64. Maybe because my friend had a Vic 20 which was a much more limited version of the 64, or maybe because it had a lot of games for it and could play cartridge games. In any case, my parents bought me the computer (which cost like $500 back in the mid-80's and was quite expensive compared to a video game console) and afterwards a disk drive for it.