In childhood, many of my differences, tics and habits were more easy to overlook, however during teen-age years, I learned certain things the hard way. I still persevered on certain topics, numbers (737 was my favorite number, and I knew its multiplication table by heart). When I talked about something that I talked about, a couple of hours ago, or even a few days ago, I was bluntly told "I am tired of you talking about xxx", or "it is the hundredth time you talked about this.", to the latter, I would simply answer "I thought it was the fourth". Since I hated blunt answers, I persued my interests in the privacy of a library. I thought people had counters in their heads, and that when that counter expired, they got mad. I wanted to take my time to pursue my interests.

I was called "mad scientist" by fellow students. I had no tolerance for teasing, and was poor in any group activity. I fared better in one-on-one discussions, than with a group. At home, my younger brother became more interested in things other boys his age were interested in. He had a circle of friends, that I did not have. My special interests, and differences (gait, monotone speech, and still, my weakness of processing non-verbal cues) made me the butt of many jokes. That fear of teasing was one more excuse to prefer the peace and quiet of the school or public library.

In small families, most aspies like the peace and quiet at home. Since there were a total of four kids in the family, the household was too hectic and I sought peace in libraries.

I had an obsession with time, and loved to set egg timers, play with stop watches, and enjoyed looking at watches in jewelry store windows. I also liked calculators, and especially liked the HP-55, because it had a 100 hour stopwatch. I knew the whole line of Hewlett Packard calculators by heart. I even owned an HP-55.

In my teenage years, I had one interest that would eventually land me a few jobs, that was computers. On my HP-55, I learned the rudiments of programming, with its 49 steps of programming memory and 20 registers. In high school, in 1977 I learned BASIC, on an HP-2000 timesharing mini-computer (We were linked with a 300 baud accoustic modem, and used a Decwriter 2 printing terminal).