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Make Something Wonderful

I grew up in Silicon Valley. My parents moved from San Francisco to Mountain View when I was five. My dad got transferred, and that was right in the heart of Silicon Valley, so there were engineers all around. Silicon Valley, for the most part, at that time, was still orchards—apricot orchards and prune orchards—and it was really paradise. I remember almost every day the air being crystal clear, where you could see from one end of the valley to the other. It was really the most wonderful place in the world to grow up.

There was a man that moved in down the street, maybe about six or seven houses down the block, who was new in the neighborhood with his wife. And it turned out that he was an engineer at Hewlett-Packard and he was a ham‑radio operator and really into electronics. What he did to get to