My interest in computers started at the pizza restaurant when I was growing up in Oregon. I always enjoyed going there for dinner with my family mainly because of the nice arcade they had. I spent my time playing the video games while we waited for the pizza. I was fascinated at the ability of a machine to interact with a person in an enjoyable and entertaining manner. I thought it was amazing on how it reacted to my movements as if it sensed I was going to make that move all along.

My curiosity on how this worked grew. I wanted to know how this was done and furthermore I wanted to program a computer to do certain tasks. So I started out with an Atari 400 copying various programs from a book and seeing how they worked. I modified them to try and make it do something slightly different. This was pretty fun to see that I could type in a series of commands and run the program and see it do what the book said it would. I still didn't really know how to program a computer though. All I was basically doing was copying programs from a book and although I learned part of the programming language, there was still quite a bit I didn't know which would allow me to work on my own.

In junior high I took a programming class in BASIC and learned the specific parts I didn't know before. Since I already had some experience with programming this was relatively easy for me. Almost all the assignments I finished early so went back and added extra features to enhance the cosmetics of the output or add some more options to the menu. At this time the school had Apple IIe's so I convinced my Dad to buy an Apple IIgs so I could work at home and write my own programs. This was very fun for me. I was in control of the computer and told it what to do. I eventually filled up a disk of programs I had written, or started (180K in those days).

My most prized program I wrote in Junior High in my free time after school was a random selector (basically drawing names out of a hat). What inspired me to do this was something my Dad's side of the family did for Christmas. Every year they had someone's name which was the person they were to buy a gift for. There were a few restrictions to whose name you could get. You obviously couldn't get your own. Your spouse was also out of the question. And finally you couldn't get the same person you had last year. Well the way they were doing it is the program they were using guaranteed you would get everyone's name once over a 12 year period of time. There were some flaws to this however. It didn't work quite well if names came or went due to divorces, marriages, etc. What I did was expand the features of the program. My version would randomly select names - like drawing out of a hat with the following restrictions. You couldn't draw yourself or your spouse. You couldn't draw the person you had the previous year or their spouse. You also couldn't draw the person you had two years previous. Furthermore you couldn't draw your spouse's choice last year. I got it working really well and changed a few things and implemented it for a couple different families.

In High School I continued to grow and learn different programming languages and techniques. We didn't really have too many computer classes so I took the only one's I could - Pascal. There was basically only one classroom where 4 different classes met. The instructor lectured occasionally to the first semester BASIC students. The second semester BASIC students were mainly on their own but were still on a fairly fixed schedule. These two courses made up more than 90% of the classroom. The other students - Intro to Pascal and AP (Advanced Placement) Computer Science (Pascal) students made up the remainder of the class conglomerate. The students in the Pascal courses worked at their own pace completing the assignments and learning from the book. We took the exams when we were ready for them. This was really my first course that I took that was in this self-taught form. I was highly motivated and eager to learn more about computers and different programming languages so I did well in the course learning Pascal. Many times I would go above and beyond the specifications, like I did in the past, and spruce up the output of the program and try and make it a little more aesthetically pleasing to those who used it. Because of this I was awarded the highest achievement award in Computer Science at my high school.

So why did I become a Computer Science major? Well by now you can see I have a true joy for computers and having them under my control. My eagerness and motivation for learning how to do this was a main spark. If I wasn't a Computer Science major I believe I would spend too much time trying to learn more about computers rather than concentrate on my major. I decided to fit my major to my interests. I want my job after graduation to be enjoyable, not something I feel I have to do every day, but something I want to do every day.

Last modified 13-May-1995
Jeff Mark