Oddly enough the ability to tinker with microcomputers at a hardware level was career changing for me, though not necessarily in a good way. In high school, I w

Oddly enough the ability to tinker with microcomputers at a hardware level was career changing for me, though not necessarily in a good way. In high school, I was interested in electronics and programming, and my mom subscribed to Byte Magazine. "Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar," a series about hardware hacking was just inspirational. But then the college that I attended (starting 1982) had a very traditional and conservative computer science department that revolved around the campus mainframe computer. It seemed boring. I also had a summer internship at a computer facility with a big mainframe. Boring. The people who were doing what seemed like cool stuff with computers were in the physics department, hooking computers up to experiments and actually doing things. The math department went along for the ride, getting personal computers on the recommendation of the physics profs. I ended up majoring in math and physics as a result of this. Of course computer science has come a long way, but that was how I saw it from my tiny isolated vantage point so many years ago. I missed out on the huge market growth for CS, though I've had a pretty good career anyway.