I was born in Arizona and spent the first ten years of my life in the desert, a few hundred miles north of the border with Mexico, surrounded by the cultures and technologies of the American Southwest.

As a child, I learned from many sources - absorbing the self-reliance of cattlemen, Mexican-Americans and Native Americans.

When I was ten years old I moved to San Francisco with my family.

I started using computers when I was 14 years old, at a San Francisco junior high school, when I and a fellow student - a boy named Paul Vixie - were teachers' aides in a remedial mathematics class that used teletypes and 300 baud modems to remotely access an HP 2000 owned by the San Francisco Unified School District, at what was then Wilson High School. During school hours, the computer was used to run a computer program that drilled students in basic arithmetic.

After hours, we used the computers to play TREK73 - a quite advanced multi-user simulation that allowed users to interact with one another, via a command-line interface, in various roles derived from the original Star Trek series.

Because the HP 2000's operating system was, in essence, a BASIC interpreter and text editor, the users were quickly exposed to the opportunity to learn BASIC programming; and we did.

The Wilson High School EDP Lab had its fair share of groupies - no other word is quite accurate - and the manager (Craig Saunders) had been a classmate of my older brother (Thomas Childers). Paul Vixie and I spent a lot of our Saturdays there at Wilson High School, playing TREK73 and programming and reading the HP 2000 Timesharing Manual (I eventually ended up with my own copy, which I still have today).

Wilson High School wasn't the only school to have an HP timesharing system installed; O'Connell High School also had a system installed, providing access to a piece of software called EUREKA, that incorporated an expert system that attempted to provide career counselling to troubled students (O'Connell was a high school that taught blue-collar tradesmanship courses). We spent some of our time there, as well.

Eventually we learned of another, third HP timesharing system, installed at the University of San Francisco, and spent most of another year hanging out at USF, late into the evening, getting access in exchange for helping the real users of the computer lab - cute undergraduates, several years older than we were - use their accounts and complete their assignments.

The period of time I describe, above, covers from 1976 to about 1980.