Dan Linder
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Prior to moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2007, I grew up and spent most of my life in the Great State of Illinois (save for a short stint in Ohio), the last decade of that spent in Champaign where I got an education, was mixed up in various entrepreneurial endeavors, met some interesting friends, and met my beautiful wife Amy, proprietor of Fabulous Pants and Maelstrom Dance.
Growing up in Chicagoland, every family probably has their museum of choice. Amy's family was really into the Field Museum; Amy is now very much into Medieval art and literature. Kids whose parents took them to the Art Institute are probably predisposed towards careers in art. Well, Greg and I went to the Museum of Science and Industry. Over and over and over. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to our parents for suffering through that place every other weekend for a decade. I think I really "got into" computers in particular when my father took us to the Chicago Bally-Midway factory on a fastening system sales call. Inside, we found a growing geek's wonderland of splayed-open BurgerTime coin-ops, electronics and computers everywhere, and everyone looking pretty happy to be at work. My first computer was an Atari 600XL I shared with my brother, given to our family by a couple who had mistakenly bought it for their kids thinking it was an Atari game system. We learned the importance of reliability and fault tolerance early on, as we had no means of data storage so had to rely on the computer not being turned off. We soon upgraded to an 800XL with a 1050 Diskette Drive. After some time with that, we parted ways ideologically. I switched teams to a Commodore 128-D and then on to my trusty Amiga 2000 (which served me from early in high school though my Junior year of college, though by then it was running NetBSD almost 100% of the time). Meanwhile, my brother stuck with the 800XL until making a major upgrade to an Atari Falcon, truly the strangest (and probably most rare) of all the Atari 32-bit ST-style machines.
