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Well, I had a lot of help from my father with the soldering and so on, and he was very good at math and was fascinated with computers, and so I was fortunate enough to have a bunch of exposure going all the way back to high school - this was in the 1960s.

I'm really interested in the current tech world because of my brother Michael. Since we were little kids, in the 1970s, he was dealing with the first computers. He works for the government.

Originally, I was in both software and in online computing. The first innovation really was sort of at that time that we're marrying the telephone and the computer so that people wouldn't have to drive to the computer center. We didn't have $1,000 computers.

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 had so much fun in early days learning about networking, security, scalability and other geeky stuff.

I like stuff designed by dead people. The old designers. They always got it right because they didn't have to grow up with computers. All of the people that made the spoon and the dishes and the vacuum cleaner didn't have microprocessors and stuff. You could do a good design back then.

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

I spent my childhood tinkering with electronic circuits, on breadboards, as they used to be called, in particular making radio transmitters.

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.