<Begin Segment 15>

BY: Then you went to the UW and you studied chemistry, correct? And then did you go right to graduate school?

TI: No, so I went chemistry because I was planning to go premed. I remember seeing my oldest brother in med school, and I remember one time he came home for dinner and he fell asleep at the dinner table. He had been up for two nights straight or whatever, and I looked at him and I said, "I don't think I want to do that." [Laughs] And so in addition to my chemistry, I got a chemical engineering degree and worked in the bioengineering field, I did research on developing hemodialyzers, the artificial kidneys, and did that for a couple years. At which point I decided, I tried to decide whether or not to go back and get a graduate degree in either chemical engineering or chemistry, or another plan. And because I didn't know, I decided to actually take a year, year and a half, and I just drove across the country. And my kids describe it, "Dad, you sound like you were homeless." I mean, I literally lived out of my car, just wanted to see the country.

BY: By yourself?

TI: Yeah, by myself, because I'd never been off the West Coast. Totally stressed my parents out, because I had this nice kind of interesting research, engineering position, and I just called them one day and I said, "You know what? I'm going to quit." And they said, "Oh, what are you going to do?" I said, "I don't know." [Laughs] "So, really, what are you going to do?" "I think I'm just going to drive." Because at that point, I really didn't know what I wanted to do.

BY: And that job was here in Seattle?

TI: No, it was in Walnut Creek, California.

BY: Oh, glad I asked.

TI: It was in the Bay Area. And I just wasn't clear. Because in many ways, I felt like there was a very clear path. From high school, I would go to college, and then get a job. And after two years of being in that job, I said, "I don't know if I want that to be the rest of my life," and so that's when I quit, not knowing what was going to happen next.

BY: What do you ascribe that kind of questioning nature to? As opposed to just getting on a path, like many young people do, and saying on a path like your older brother did?

TI: It was just not feeling, kind of, fulfilled, that there was something more to life than that. It was just like this sense of, there has to be more to life than just getting a good job and just doing that, and then finding other things, there must be a larger purpose or something, it was just sort of gnawing at me. And, again, not really knowing what that was. So I literally thought, "So I'll just drive and I'll find it." And I just drove and saw the country.

BY: How far did you go?

TI: Well, so I ended up, eventually I ended up in the Washington, D.C., area. I was fascinated by all the museums and things, so I was there. And when I was there, I actually just did a job interview with NASA at that point, and actually had a job offer. It was kind of in their material science, and probably would have been working on things like the space shuttle, things like that, materials. And so they offered me this job, and I said okay, so I accepted it. And that was when Ronald Reagan was elected president, and one of the first things he did was he put a hiring freeze on the government. And so, literally, I had accepted the offer and was supposed to start in like a month or something. And in that period, Reagan had done the hiring freeze, so at that point they said the job had to be rescinded so I couldn't join. So I ended up coming back to Seattle.

BY: Would that have sent you to where, Houston?

TI: No, they actually had a research facility in Bethesda or someplace in that area that I would have stayed there.

BY: Wow, so you were almost a NASA engineer.

TI: I was almost a NASA engineer, and that would have been a whole different path. At that point I had run out of money and didn't know what I wanted to do. So I decided to go back to graduate school, but rather than in the sciences, I actually decided to do it in business. Because I remember when I was a research engineer, it was a fairly small company, it was called Cordis Dow, it was actually a subsidiary of Dow Chemical, which had developed this hollow fiber membrane technology that we used to make these hemodialyzers. But I remember distinctly, there was a decision the company had to make in terms of direction. And from my perspective it was pretty clear, from a technical reason, that we should do, go down this one path. And the company decided to go the other way, and I just was confounded. And the reason given was, "It's for business reasons." And I just said, oh, there's this powerful thing called business that would make a company do this versus something which I thought was right from the technical, everything I'm trained to say it should be this, and they did something else for business reasons. So I decided, well, I'm going to learn more about this business side. And so I went back and got an MBA to just try to understand that side more.

And so I went back to the University of Washington, got my MBA, and it was that time when I got exposed to personal computers. Because between my first and second year in grad school, I had an internship with IBM. And it was the year that the IBM personal computer came out, and I remember being in a sales office, downtown Seattle, when literally these boxes showed up. And they didn't know what to do with me in this office because they usually had interns that didn't have as much experience or even programming abilities. So these boxes weren't being used, so I just opened them up and I started playing around with the IBM PC and programming, Fortran, and doing some VisiCalc and things like that. Pretty soon I'm showing these guys demonstrations of what this little thing can do. And they're all fascinated because they sell these really big IBM boxes where you'd need teams of programmers to just get something to show up to do something. And here this intern was, like, creating these visual programs and doing things. But then I was just sold on personal computers. I thought, oh my gosh, this is going to change the world, and this was like 1981 when the PC came out.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2020 Densho. All Rights Reserved.