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I had been building electronic musical instruments since I was a kid.

Back in the '40s and early '50s, building simple electronic projects was a popular hobby of many people. Back then, you could buy, you know, a few parts and - with tubes and build something on your kitchen table, and it would actually work.

I started with CB radio, ham radio, and eventually went into computers. And I was just fascinated with it. And back then, when I was in school, computer hacking was encouraged. It was an encouraged activity. In fact, I remember one of the projects my teacher gave me was writing a log-in simulator.

I'm not much into current electronic stuff, what I think of as lounge electronics, mumbling electronics.

I grew up years ago doing something that unfortunately doesn't hardly exist any more, a medium called Radio.

My father was a ham radio geek, and I remember the glow of the vacuum tubes from a Hammarlund receiver that became a hand-me-down to me.

I'm fascinated with the electronic devices that we can mess around with.

I joined the staff of EMI in Middlesex in 1951, where I worked for a while on radar and guided weapons and later ran a small design laboratory. During this time, I became particularly interested in computers, which were then in their infancy. It was interesting, pioneering work at that time: drums and tape decks had to be designed from scratch.

Today, people tend to credit me with having the original idea and made the first circuits.