My background is in hardware design. I found hardware work to be a welcome change from thousands of hours of programming and that led to the designs you mentioned.

I have been wildly enthused about gaming since I was younger and a career path I chose not to go down but did really consider was getting into programming and game design.

Clearly programming courses should teach methods of design and construction and the selected examples should be such that a gradual development can be nicely demonstrated.

But active programming consists of the design of new programs rather than contemplation of old programs.

My dad was the manager at the 45 000-acre ranch but he owned his own 1 200-acre ranch and I owned four cattle that he gave to me when I graduated from grammar school from the eighth grade. And those cows multiplied and he kept track of them for years for me. And that was my herd.

There were no PCs when I started programming on computers.

Yeah computers are going to take over the programming business because they have become so fast recently that they can solve the Halting Problem in five seconds flat.

It always helps to be a good programmer. It is important to like computers and to be able to think of things people would want to do with their computers.

Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations... They now need more and more expensive clerks even though they call them 'operators' or 'programmers.'

What I was proud of was that I used very few parts to build a computer that could actually speak words on a screen and type words on a keyboard and run a programming language that could play games. And I did all this myself.