What got you interested in technology? IT's rich and famous share their memories

From father of the internet Vint Cerf to visionary sci-fi author William Gibson, the hardware that got IT's hall of fame started...

Superstars of the tech world like Dell CEO Michael Dell, father of the internet Vint Cerf and sci-fi author William Gibson have changed the way the world thinks about and consumes technology - but where did their passion for computing first start?

silicon.com spoke to some of the biggest names in computing, technology and related fields to find out how their early experiences kindled their love of tech.

VINT CERF
Co-inventor of the internet's TCP/IP protocols

What are your memories of your first computer?
The first one I saw in person in 1958 was called Sage (Semi-Automated Ground Environment) housed at System Development Corporation (SDC) in Santa Monica, California. SDC was a spin-off from RAND Corporation (a US Air Force think tank), as I recall.

Sage was a tube-based computer housed in at least three rooms, and you literally went inside the computer whose tubes lined the walls of the room. The operators sat in front of large, circular radar screens. It was like a scene out of Dr Strangelove (which would not be released until 1964). The system took radar tracking information as input from Distant Early Warning stations in northern Canada. The idea was to detect incoming Russian bombers flying over the North Pole to attack the United States and Canada.

The second computer that I actually got to program was called a Bendix G-15. It used punched paper tape for input and output which was prepared or printed using a Flexowriter keyboard/printer system. My best friend, Stephen D Crocker, got permission to use this machine at UCLA around 1960 when we were both still in high school.

What was the moment that first got you excited about the potential of technology?
Apart from the early experience with the computer at UCLA, I think I became particularly excited as an undergraduate at Stanford University where I got to use an extraordinary computer called the Burroughs B5000. I learned to program in Burroughts Algol (BALGOL) and discovered that you could create whole, simulated worlds that basically did whatever you told them to do. You could create a whole, synthetic, virtual universe to play with. I was hooked!

What modern technology do you wish you had growing up and why?
I really would have liked to have a personal computer that I could use all the time. In the early days, we had to use punched cards and submit our 'decks' to the high priest of the computer centre (uh, the computer operator, actually) and hope that the one or two runs we could get in a day would produce results as opposed to annoying syntax error messages. Having a computer at your disposal 24 hours a day would have been fabulous! Of course, I wish I had also had access to the internet but didn't get to use even its predecessor, the Arpanet, until I was about 26 years old (and a graduate student at UCLA).

STEPHEN ELOP
President and CEO of Nokia

What are your memories of your first computer?
Atari 800. I have distinct memories of the 300-baud acoustic modem, that required me to dial (as in by spinning the phone dial) the university computer, listen for the wail, and then stick the phone handset into the modem. I also recall with some clarity that you had only about a 50/50 chance of moving data between Atari computers using a floppy disk because the alignment between floppy disk drives was never guaranteed.

What was the moment that first got you excited about the potential of technology?
The first moment that I became truly excited was when using the full text editor EDIT/EDT on a VAX 11-780 minicomputer running VMS. After painstakingly writing and editing Fortran 77 programs using a line editor, I could now move the cursor around the screen, edit at will, all powered by my VT-100 terminal. Amazing.

Thereafter, there have been a series of distinct 'technology revelation' moments. My first IBM PC, complete with a 5Mb removable cartridge hard drive. First cell phone. First access to the internet etc, etc.

What modern technology do you wish you had growing up and why?
The internet, with its vast collection of searchable information. I am able to so much more efficiently learn, find things and complete the picture on so many topics, in every setting... I only realise now how limited my visibility was so many years ago. Of course, I will be writing the same thing again in 10 years.