Wisdom worth sharing, words worth remembering.
In some parts of life like mathematics and science yeah I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by.
Teachers started recognizing me and praising me for being smart in science and that made me want to be even smarter in science!
Atari is a very sad story.
Wherever smart people work doors are unlocked.
Another hero was Tom Swift in the books. What he stood for the freedom the scientific knowledge and being and engineer gave him the ability to invent solutions to problems. He's always been a hero to me. I buy old Tom Swift books now and read them to my own children.
But I know newspapers. They have the first amendment and they can tell any lie knowing it's a lie and they're protected if the person's famous or it's a company.
If I designed a computer with 200 chips I tried to design it with 150. And then I would try to design it with 100. I just tried to find every trick I could in life to design things real tiny.
It would be nice to design a real briefcase – you open it up and it's your computer but it also stores your books.
My goal wasn't to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers.
At our computer club we talked about it being a revolution. Computers were going to belong to everyone and give us power and free us from the people who owned computers and all that stuff.
My whole life had been designing computers I could never build.
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.