After graduating from Lake Stevens High School, Washington in 1981, I began attending Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. At first my major was Astrophysics, which I chose because I was very interested in weird astronomical phenomenon like Black Holes and Quasars. But I learned quickly that the Astrophysics courses were ninety percent Physics and only ten percent Astronomy. Also there were very few jobs in that field. Disillusioned, I changed my major to Math for one semester. That Summer after my Freshman year, I stayed with my cousin Llance and he had just gotten a Commodore 64 with the tape drive. It's funny today to think that we actually once stored computer programs on cassette tape, from which they would be loaded directly into memory, as there was no such thing as a personal hard drive at that time.
My first computer program was based on the theory that the upcoming planetary alignment in 1983 would be catastrophic for the Earth. What I wanted to do was to calculate the amount of planetary alignment "bulge", which is to say, a calculation to show how much the planets were aligned or not, on any particular date. I don't really recall reading John Gribben's "The Jupiter Effect", I think I must have picked up this idea from Hal Lindsey's "The Late Great Planet Earth". Maybe someone can correct me, that he actually states this in his book.
At any rate, I started with tables of known planetary conjunctions to calculate where each planet was in relation to the Earth, and then calculated orbits and the amounts of alignment. Obviously, I was into computer programming. So when I returned to college for my Sophomore year, I changed my major to computer programming.
I became addicted to the computer game Adventure which was loaded on the university's DEC PDP 11 computer. Every university student could get free time on the computers, so after I had exhausted my own time, I got other students to sign up and give me their time as well, so I could keep playing. By the time Summer came around again, I had easily amassed a few hundred hours of time, between the free time and the time I needed for my computer programming classes.
That Summer after my Sophomore year, I had no money and decided to stay and work the Summer, instead of going home to Washington. So I went to the on-campus employment office and there was an advertisement for someone to be a nightime operator in Chicago. One of the questions I was asked at that interview was "How much time have you spent in front of a CRT?" No kidding, that was an actual question, and of course because of Adventure, my answer was "a few hundred hours". I can't say that was the only reason I got that job, but it had to be one.
So that Summer of 1983, I was the nighttime operator for the Academy of General Dentistry's, Microdata Reality 1600, which was my first job in Pick.