The Commodore 64 was so named because it had 64KB of RAM, of which about 40K were free after startup, the rest taken up by the BASIC interpreter. With the Commodore 64 my parents also bought me subscriptions to various computer magazines such as Commodore 64 Magazine and Power/Play (both Commodore house organs) and Computer. They all had programs people could type in (and save on either tape or floppy disk) and I spent a lot of time laborously typing in code for some rather simple programs.

The hardest to enter were graphic and sound games, in which you just entered line after line of numbers to be used as data. There were some helper aids, both from Computer I think. One was a shell program that you typed in (of course) and saved, but afterwards you ran the program and then typed in other programs, each line including a checksum so that if you entered the line incorrectly the shell would tell you immediately. Quite handy when typing in a 500 line program. The other aid was a barcode scanner you could buy. The programs had both text and barcode listings, and you could use the scanner and the supplied software to just scan in the program listing (I never got one of those).

There was also a floppy disk based magazine (PowerRun?) that had games and other activities and articles, all already on disk so you didn't have to type anything in. One of my first programming projects was to recreate the floppy disk based magazine, except with my games and writings. It didn't go anywhere but it was a fun thing to do and got me some programming experience.

In any case, I had that computer going to college, which brings me to Senior Year in high school. I had already scored well in the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), had somehow turned my 3.5 GPA entering my Sophomore Year into a 4.0 GPA which looked great in college applications, and had a couple of clubs and other activities that complemented my scholastic record.

So getting into a good college was not the question. I had four to choose from (you could mail your SAT scores to four colleges, more than that is an extra fee) and I applied to Stanford, Cal, UC Davis, and UCLA. But the big question was what major to apply for? Up at that point I had *no* idea what I wanted to do with my life. What the heck does one do with a Math, or Science, or Philosophy degree?

As I looked through the list of majors, I saw a couple of computer related majors (isn't it strange how different colleges have different names for Computer Engineering majors?). I thought "hey, I love computer games, like programming, maybe I can be a game programmer". My parents though wanted something more practical and I knew that engineers made good money so when I saw Electrical Engineering and Computer Science I thought that here was the perfect major. I could learn both and satisfy both myself and my parents.

So that's why I chose EECS. I actually didn't think I would get in because the application form said that EECS was an impacted major (and probably still is). But I figured, if it's such a tough major to get into and if I do get accepted then it should be much easier to transfer out of EECS than into it. I chose similar majors for the other three colleges and was accepted into all but Stanford. I chose Berkeley because that's where my best friend (at the time) was going to and at the time I wanted to go to a school with a Division I sports program and UCLA was too far away.