Donald's family was one of the very first to obtain the 8-bit Atari VCS (later named Atari 2600) console in 1977, slightly before it's public release in the United States. At the age of 11, he was copying examples from the Atari Basic booklet into the console, displaying classic programs such as "A IS 12".

     By the age of 15 in 1983, he wrote his first Pac-Man on the 8-bit Commodore 64 and a simple version of Joust. Computer systems he worked with included the Atari Computers (400, 800), Commodore computers (VIC-20, C-64), TSR-80, IBM XT, Apple Lisa, and Apple ][.

     In high school he won local tournaments for computer programming, placed Bronze in the International Computer Problem Solving Competition, returned the next year as the team captain and placed Silver.

     After high school, two attempts to work while in college failed due to the nature of the job which required random schedules with random days off and unwillingness to cooperate with a school schedule. Meanwhile, he continued self-study with a constantly growing library of computer science books and a file cabinet stuffed with notes and hand-written programs. [to be continued]