they were the best

1970 - 1st grade

Dad decided we'd be missionaries in Japan.

Road trip through churches in California to raise support (ask for money). Sang "Happiness is the Lord" in front of a LOT of churches.

Road trip to Illinois. Lived there while my Dad got a principal cert. Had a grand piano at the house we stayed at. Back then you watched a lot of TV and got into trouble outside. Hit Yellowstone on the way back to Seattle.

1971 - 2nd,3rd grade

At Osaka Christian School where my Dad was principal of a one house, 2 room school for grades 1-12 for missionary kids. He taught 7-12, My teacher (Ms. Hertz) taught 1-6.

School had 2 big fields. (probably previously rice patties). with butterflies, weird beetles, frogs, ants. ^^^Frog.

Got to school on the back of my Dad's teeny motorcycle and walked home. Played in huge rice field hay piles on the way home.

Japanese culture was pretty shocking. Everything extremely compact and weird. Especially bathrooms. Candy and toy complexity and variety blew me away. Porn: two story posters at movie theaters. Ads in grocery stores. Buddist/Shinto shrines/temples and neighborhood festivals and parades. Swimming pool complexes the size of about 8 x 8 city blocks. Huge loop pool with water jets to make a current.

Lived in old converted army base housing. Had an upright piano.

Summer vacations at the warm sea in tents and cabins.

Everywhere I went I heard "Gaijin Da". meaning "there's a white dude" ("foreigner over there")

1973 - 4th grade

Back to Seattle cuz of my Dad's manic depression. One year of cub scouts and the shock of American grade school. Then somehow we got to go back to Japan - no idea why.
Learned electronics a bit cuz my Dad would stop at Radio Shack with his free battery card. So I got

Electronic components on cardboard schematic graphics. Connected to springs to slip wires into. Electronics 101 in a box for kids. Radio Shack used to be the coolest place in the world. Now not so much.

1974 - 5th,6th grade

Took my sister on the back of my bike and then 2 trains to new school. Lost my sisters occasionally. They usually showed up pretty quick on the video surveilance of the train platforms.
Took an interest in math and Japan had much cooler electronic project sets. Wayyy better transformers - turned into more than cars, had magnets.
Saw my first calculator. That was a BIG DEAL for me.

1976 - Whitman Junior High in Seattle

Yeah, my Dad had another manic episode and no more Japan for us.
Good little Christian Steve was thrown in with the swearing pot smokers. Was surprised that all these kids didn't know they were going to hell. ...I changed my ways pretty fast and joined them.

Was verrry shy. Had 2 best friends, and few others. Went to church till part way through college. Was done deciding on atheism before high school, though. I'd read all the bible, memorized literally hundreds of verses. For me, God did not compute. Error. Kinda freaked out my family.

Popular Electronics was a GREAT magazine.

Learned about integrated circuits, soldering and breadboards from it. Favorite project was a dice display with red LEDs that would "roll" while you held a pushbutton. Also, blinking sequence of LEDs in a line.

Breadboards minimized the soldering (which I suck at).

My most advanced project was a shift adder.
Pushing a button 8 times did a binary add with carry of each LED "binary digit".
This is how computers add bytes. And how they subtract bytes. (Adding the 2s complement is subtracting) And subtracting bytes lets you compare bytes negative? do one thing. positive? do another. the most rudimentary part of all IF statements.
So that's electrons making a decision - thought occuring in wires.

I stole my Atari 2600 from the Bon Marche downtown. On the highway to hell.

I still threw away a HUGE FORTUNE in quarters playing Pac Man, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Dig Dug, Pole Position, Tempest, Centipede, Galaga, etc in the arcades with my buddy Richard. At least I learned ONE thing: games are a big waste of time and keep you from writing code.

First software I wrote was for calculators

MINE was a hp16c! Converted between ALL number bases. Reverse Polish Notation and sequences of calculator ops - that was my intro to software

1979 - Ingraham Highschool

First job! Dishwasher=>Cook at the Omelette House by the zoo. Worked here till college.

Real computers entered my life at school. Commodore Pet

TRS 80 Model 3 (Tandy Radio Shack)

When I first laid eyes on the Pet, I was hooked. I RAN for it and sat there wondering what to do. The 5 other kids I had to share it with wanted to turn it ON and I think one guy actually knew how to. But I wouldn't let him. I just sat there staring in wonder.

BASIC I learned the wierd dialects of Commodore and TRS 80 BASIC. Had casette tape drives for storing programs. Loading programs back wasn't a thing that always happened. Took quite some time to load a 2K program. PETs had no graphics mode - just a 40 x 25 text grid to print * in. TRS 80s had a 128 x 48 graphics mode by dividing a character (64 x 24) into quarters.

I was taking geometry and could use the COS and SIN functions to plot out circles and sin curves. Polar equations for a rotating line! I was able to put math on the screen - pretty cool.

Still no printing.

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