He also shared that among his role models as a child were his parents, who met each other "building the first computer commercialized in the UK - the Ferranti Mk 1." And his first computer he built himself.
"I got a M6800 evaluation kit in 1976, and built a bunch of 3U high cards, put them in a rack with a car battery in the bottom of the crate as UPS. All hand-soldered on veroboard, and programmed in hex," he wrote. "[...] The display was an old TV and some logic and a bunch of discarded calculator buttons lovingly relabeled with transfer letters. Those were the days...."