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. I remember especially
Heinlein'sHave Spacesuit Will Travel and Asimov's I, Robot, with its Three Laws of
Robotics. I was enchanted by the descriptions of space travel, and wanted to
have a telescope to look at the stars; since I had no money to buy or make one, I
checked books on telescope-making out of the library and read about making
them instead. I soared in my imagination.
Thursday nights my parents went bowling, and we kids stayed home alone. It was
the night of Gene Roddenberry's original Star Trek, and the program made a big
impression on me. I came to accept its notion that humans had a future in space,
Western-style, with big heroes and adventures. Roddenberry's vision of the
centuries to come was one with strong moral values, embodied in codes like the
Prime Directive: to not interfere in the development of less technologically
advanced civilizations. This had an incredible appeal to me; ethical humans, not
robots, dominated this future, and I took Roddenberry's dream as part of my own.
I excelled in mathematics in high school, and when I went to the University of
Michigan as an undergraduate engineering student I took the advanced curriculum
of the mathematics majors. Solving math problems was an exciting challenge, but
when I discovered computers I found something much more interesting: a
machine into which you could put a program that attempted to solve a problem,
after which the machine quickly checked the solution
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