Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

by Jeff Bezos

In 1974, when he was ten, his passion for Star Trek led him to computers. He discovered that he could play a space video game on the terminal in the computer room of his elementary school in Houston, where his father was working for Exxon. This was in the days before personal computers, and a dial-up modem connected the school’s computer terminal to the mainframe of a company that had donated its excess computer time. “We had a teletype that was connected by an old acoustic modem,” Bezos says. “You literally dialed a regular phone and picked up the handset and put it in this little cradle. And nobody—none of the teachers knew how to operate this computer, nobody did. But there was a stack of manuals, and me and a couple of other kids stayed after class and learned how to program this thing.… And then, we learned that the mainframe programmers in some central location somewhere in Houston had already programmed this computer to play Star Trek. And from that day forward all we did was play Star Trek.”