Nicholas Bousley

My earliest memories of interacting with computers were playing floppy disc based flight sim and battle zone tank game with my father. Around sixth grade I was lucky to have one of the apple classic computers with a black and white monitor in my room. There was this fun Star Wars inspired shuffleboad game that I probably played too much. I should also mention about this time my father is selling computers to NASA for a living so we would have things laying around.

With access to parts that my Dad would have from mistakes that were made on orders, I started building/tinkering with my computer's hardware. Sophmore year of High School I completed Computer Science I, setting me up for Computer Science II my juinor year. To complete the second class we all had to create a game, one that worked. My love of playing Street Fighter II led me to pursue a really bad copy of Street Fighter (first one). I never was able to make different levels and it had the Donkey Kong thing where your charector was not bound by the screen and would appear on the other side. All the bumps and bruises aside though, it worked. That cost me many hours of sitting in my bedroom trying to get the game to work before the deadline, and a lesson about project scope was learned.

My junior year, a new program started that gave seniors the opportunity to complete Cisco I-IV in one year. Having completed CS I & CS II along with the fact that I created a fighting game that mostly worked, I interviewed and was admitted into the class. What an amazing experience to be introduced to these concepts a little earlier along with the fact that the credit would tranfer to college! I used that knowledge to rip and replace all network cables at the church I grew up in for my Eagle Scout project. From there I would go on to take an inventory job at Apple and my intrests would continue.