up a group of people. They were
definitely hippies. And I took them down to Santa Cruz. We're hanging out on the boardwalk and I notice that one of them, a young girl sitting on a bench, was breast-feeding. Breast-feeding! I'd never seen anything like that before in my life! I just turned my head away really quickly, but it made such an impression on me. I started talking to her, and immediately fell in love with her and her baby. It turned out that she and her baby and a bunch of people all lived together in this commune near me in Sunnyvale. Later I would ride my bike out there a lot and stop at a park near their house and read books. I would go over and hang out with them. We'd eat and do the ohm chanting and all of that. And they would take me with them to meet all these Eastern philosophy- type teachers, really getting me exposed to Eastern thoughts of peace and quietness. I listened to these principles of meditation, and I would just sit down and try to get my head into a quiet place by myself.
The sad thing was, eventually even these hippies didn't want to hang around me anymore. It made them uncomfortable that I didn't do drugs.
So this was a hard social time for me. I remember that at one point I was taking some night classes at San Jose State and this pretty girl comes up to my table in the cafeteria and says, "Oh, hi." She just starts talking to me, and I'm so nervous all I can think to ask her is what her major is. She says, "Scientology." I'd never heard of this, but she assured me it was actually a major and I believed it.
She invited me to a Scientology meeting, and of course I went. I ended up in the audience watching this guy make this incredible presentation about how you can basically be in better control of yourself and that you could get really happy from that.
After the meeting, the girl I met sat with me in some little office for an hour, trying to sell me these courses to become a better person. I was going to have to pay money for them.
I said to her, "I've already got my happiness. I've got my keys to happiness. I don't need anything. I'm not looking for any of this stuff." And I meant it. The only thing I mightVe wanted was a girlfriend, that's for sure, but the rest of the stuff I already had. I had a sense of humor, and I had this attitude about life that let me choose to be happy. I knew that whether to be happy was always going to be my choice, and only my choice.
Plus I had these values, values I'd grown up with. I already had this peaceful feeling inside my head. To this day, I'm one of those people whose head just floats. I really did feel happy most of the time. I still do.
So the bottom line, of course, is she never sold me any courses or anything. In fact, she just walked out and never came back. When I wasn't interested in buying her courses, she left and just let me sit there. I sat and sat, waiting for her to come back. Finally I walked out the door and left, too. I thought, Man, that's too bad. She was just about sales, that's all she was.
• o •
After my year at De Anza, I decided the thing to do was to take a job where I could actually program computers. I thought I'd skip a year of school so I could earn enough money to go for a third one, at Berkeley maybe.
Now, for a while I'd been telling my dad that I definitely was going to own a 4K-byte Data General Nova someday. That was just enough kilobytes needed to program in. It was this huge, powerful computer at the time. I loved its internal architecture and everything about it. I even had a poster of it up in my room. So I heard there was a place in Sunnyvale that sold these Data General computers. My friend Allen Baum and I drove down to the place.
Well, the office was beautiful, and right in the middle of the lobby was this big glass display with a large computer in it. It wasn't a room-sized computer like a mainframe, but a midsized
computer. It was about as large as a refrigerator, with other things like large printers and
Larry Berger & Michael Colton, Michael Colton, Manek Mistry, Paul Rossi, Workman Publishing
Belinda Boring
Giovanna Fletcher
Aubrie Dionne
Anne McCaffrey
Amy Miles
Cathy MacRae
Thomas Hollyday
Kent David Kelly
Mike Ripley