Scott’s first connection to the virtual world was via CompuServe in early 1983 on his TRS-80 Model III using a 300-baud AT&T modem he received in a trade for several cords of firewood. Here is how he got there.

In February of 1983, while in his final year of community college, Scott won a Super Bowl Pool and, from his winnings, paid $750 for his first computer with 4K of RAM and a cassette tape storage system. The next day, to his parents’ horror, he had taken the system apart to see how it worked. By the end of the week, he’d written a dice-rolling game from scratch in BASIC that consumed all the system resources. By March, he had purchased 16K of RAM via mail-order.

Scott answered a newspaper classified ad in April seeking a part-time BASIC programmer. A local educational materials company, Orange Cherry Media, was looking to add software to its catalog of film strip products. They employed Scott as the only hourly programmer, and several others were hired per job. Scott had two daily tasks: debugging and validating contract workers’ code for educational TRS-80 games and authoring new Apple II+ educational software. For the Apple development, he was provided with content in two forms: a BASIC listing from a Commodore PET 2000 and limited time to run the program on that system and take notes on its execution. He then had to replicate the program flow on the Apple II+. Scott quickly eclipsed the owner’s code using the Apple II’s high-resolution (320×200) pixel-based color graphics. The PET 2000 had black and white block graphics. Scott kept this job throughout the summer, working mainly evenings and weekends.

Scott graduated with an associate’s degree in Electrical Engineering Technology from the local community college in June. Over the summer, he started a driveway sealing business and used the proceeds from that venture to upgrade his system further. He maxed the memory (48K RAM, three banks of 16KB each, with the remaining 16KB used by the ROM) and installed a pair of internal single-sided floppy drives (90KB per disk). He then upgraded to an external 1200 baud modem, stripped the class-A amplifier from the cassette deck, wired it directly inside the computer case, and cut through the case to install an external volume knob so his system could have sound. This was a “business” computer, and as such, it lacked both sound and color.

In the fall, Scott and a friend of his, one of the TRS-80 coders through Orange Cherry Media, left for the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). They had one of the few rooms outside the Computer Science dorm, which had not one computer but two (a TRS-80 Model I and III). They had also engineered it, so they had two phone lines in the room and emergency access to the telco closet for those occasions when, perhaps I’ve already probably said too much. Let’s say he made many very low-cost phone calls home to his girlfriend, who’s now my wife of 30+ years…