Who am I? How did I become a Computer Scientist? Science Fairs!

High School science fairs are largely to blame for me becoming a computer scientist, and not an industrial chemist or something else.

In year 6 (NZ school system) I entered the regional Bay of Plenty science fair with an experiment on zone electrophoresis (from memory it involved high voltage - the fun part - and other stuff. It was a live demonstration (always dangerous) with me not there, and I recall they had to shut it off because of smoke and maybe fire being produced - whoops). Fail # 1 for a career in industrial chemistry.

By year 7 (final year of high school) I was more interested in electronics, so I entered 2 things in the science fair (and won 2 prizes, 1st prize for electronics, and 2nd for general science entry).

The 1st was another "scientific" experiment, I build a simple nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer (NMR) - basically a machine to wiggle water molecules.  It didn't have any "moving" parts just a large permanent magnetic, a sweep generator (high frequency generator), a test tube with water, a radio frequency receiver thingy, an oscilloscope, etc. It was a miracle that it worked (according to the judge, professor of physics at Waikato where I ended up studying the next year) but it did. 

In 1979 I also built a microprocessor based computer (which won 1st prize for electronics, even though I recall that it didn't work yet for the science fair, I had 2 wires reversed which took me months to debug).

It was based on the SC/MP chip. It was based on the Dick Smith Mini-Scamp kit (but I built if from scratch),  with 256 Bytes of memory. And it didn't have switches or LEDS for programming like this picture. Mine was a step up with a numeric keyboard from a HP calculator and hexadecimal displays. I actually got it to work as a music synthesizer. This was my 1st computer, the 2nd was a 6809 based computer I built in 1984 with a friend at university with 64KB RAM! Note that this was in the days when you had to build your own computer. My high school was still trying to raise sufficient funds to buy an Apple II (?) computer in 1979, I remember making and running a stall at the carnival for fund raising which rang a buzzer if you thew coins onto a playing surface and were lucky enough to bridge 2 contacts. The stall "selling" teachers to throw water balloons and tomatoes at made a lot more money.

So by end of year 7 at high school I had given up on a career as an industrial chemist, and decided on either physics or computer science. I had realised by then that electronics was a poor mans computer and that programming was the future. If you could program a computer you didn't need to mess around with circuitry and a soldering iron each time you wanted to change your program to do something new and different.