Mary Withers:  

This will surprise anyone who remembers me: I ended up with exactly the career I'd featured in that 10th Grade Guidance Class term paper/report we all had to do! I chose "Technical Writer", back then, because it seemed like a way of using my passion for words, along with my curiosity about science and technology, to actually support myself and a family. After a stint in Haight Ashbury and living in a treehouse in the forests of Mendocino County (yeah, really ...) I started a family in 1970 (with 1967 VNHS graduate Ronnie Weiss, who died in 1974 when his childhood cancer recurred.) To pay the bills, I decided to bail on college and get a job keypunching at UCLA. The early 70s were an exciting time at UCLA, and I was privileged to meet many of the founders of the Internet, including the man most widely regarded as the Internet's inventor, Professor Leonard Kleinrock, and many now-famous members of the UNIX community. These contacts, and the obvious ramifications of this growing technology, influenced me to return to college in 1977, studying Computer Science at UCSD. I ran out of money in 1980, so I didn't graduate, choosing to *make* money at a friend's tech startup instead of *paying* money to the University of California. When one has mouths to feed in the here and now, sometimes one has to back-burner one's higher education. But hey -- I learned a lot, including some pretty twisty-turny technical stuff. I enjoyed a long and lucrative career in the industry, as a technical wri...Expand for more