Software Engineering Daily · Tuesday, September 29, 2026
Cory Doctorow shares his early life experiences with computing, starting with a mechanical 'Cardiac' computer in 1976 and progressing to early personal computers and modems. He describes how his father's background in computer science influenced his path, leading him to pursue programming and writing science fiction from a young age, eventually leading to his career in tech policy and activism.
“So, our first computer wasn't even electric, it was mechanical. We had a computer called a Cardiac, a very low-powered cardboard touring complete device that was invented at Bell Labs by engineers who were worried that you had an incoming generation post-transistor who wouldn't understand how actual logic gates worked.”
“I started selling those as a teenager. So, when I was 17, I ended up dropping out of four undergraduate programs. Never got a degree. Dropped out finally out of the University of Waterloo where I was working on what we would today call machine learning, back then it was cellular automata stuff.”