Mountain Range

Surviving Spring Break on the Mountain: The Power of Experiential Education blends high‑stakes mountaineering, military SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) lessons, ethical challenges in Big Tech, and the craft of software development into a single, practical framework for navigating power imbalance. Through vivid stories, from POW training to winter ascents of Mount Rainier to the legacy of Nathaniel Bowditch, you learn how to develop judgment, resist disinformation, remain intact under pressure, and grow into a trustworthy practitioner who helps others rise with you. This is a book about skill, ethics, resilience, and mastering your craft through experience, clarity, and courage.

I discovered the birth of modern computing has a surprising origin: radio. That is not well known because facts remained classified for a long time. Modern computing systems emerged from interconnected problems of crime, law enforcement, intelligence, and national defense during the twentieth century.

Beginning with Prohibition‑era smuggling and early cryptanalysis, we follow institutional and technical developments through World War II, Cold War air defense, and the rise of large‑scale commercial computing. This narrative is grounded in documented events, organizations, and machines, with occasional personal recollection used for historical context.

The book is written as retrospective nonfiction and can be read as a series of connected historical episodes rather than as a technical or instructional work.

You will be wondering about the rubber duck atop a CRAY-1 being hand assembled in Chippewa Falls. Our passive-aggressive employee dissent became the Ducky Day annual celebration. This book brings you the unusual company culture that kept us in first place when second place did not count. Wizardry came from engineering not magic. We viewed constraints as points of leverage, identifying capabilities before suggesting solutions.

This book is a first‑person historical account of working inside and alongside high‑end computing environments from the late twentieth century.

Through personal anecdotes and technical reminiscence, it documents how software, hardware, and organizations operated in practice, including legacy systems, supercomputing culture, and professional life inside institutions such as Cray Research and related organizations. The focus remains on what existed and how work was experienced at the time.

The material is presented as reflective nonfiction, combining workplace memoir with computing history, rather than as instruction or professional guidance.

Skimming will fail. This book creates a capability in you, the reader, that you do not already have. That is the entire purpose: a new capability that you can use right now, today. Not a skill, not an optimized technique, not motivation or hype, a capability.

Capabilities Before Solutions

Cray Research, in creating the world's fastest supercomputers, obviously accomplished things that had never been done before. We looked at things that were "impossible," and treated those barriers as opportunities. That barrier showed us the point of greatest leverage.

But we did something special before we looked at possible solutions. We carefully examined and measured our actual capabilities, and defined what capability must exist to take advantage of that leverage. That exercise told us where to look for solutions. We accomplished what nobody before us accomplished, by creating and understanding capabilities that enabled creating the world's best and fastest.

This book creates in you a world-class capability: becoming capable of teaching expert thinking, even though you might not think you are expert at the moment. This book draws you through the process of experiencing expert thinking in a manner that you can immediately use yourself.

But you will need to think, and experience, and learn. This book does not offer shortcuts or even a summary. You will discover skills you already knew, but did not know you knew. That is why you will be able to apply this new capability later today.

Gifted and Talented Education

It can be difficult finding techniques that reach profoundly gifted children, let alone create capabilities you personally can use with such children.

At the height of the Cold War, large school districts swept through their elementary schools searching for potential mathematicians and rocket scientists as a matter of national security. Two groups were identified: the gifted and talented, and the very much smaller group of children who simply exceeded what the test could measure. During 4th Grade I was placed in that latter group because my abstract verbal and thinking skills were outside measurement range.

I write from within that mindset both directly for Gifted and Talented (particularly those strong in abstract verbal and thinking skills) and for the rest of us who work with this type of talent. We had many such people at Cray Research. The key in writing is to provide enough depth, out of respect for the reader. Those chapters are by far the most fun to write because I don't have to hold back.