History

Randall was born into a rather average, middle-class family in a small city in New Jersey. His father was an assistant manager for a local company, his mother worked part-time in a bank, and he had a brother three years older, Mark, with whom he fought a great deal, though they get along much better now that they are adults.

Since he was little, Rand (his preferred nickname; he hates the sound of “Randy”) liked computers. This was before the era of personal computers, but he became so fascinated with the books he read about computers that his father decided to take him to see the mainframe at his workplace. The four-year-old was awed. When he was starting elementary school, his father bought their first computer, and soon his parents were worried about all the time Rand spent staring at the green letters on its black screen. At first, he and his brother played games on it; soon Mark got bored with it, though, and Rand spent more and more time writing simple games in Basic. His parents had to limit his time using it.

By the time he was in third grade, all the teachers in his school knew to come to him if they were having computer trouble. He became an unofficial school technician, and he was beginning to learn about electronics from books he checked out from the library. He sent away for electronic kits, and built little radios and strobe lights. After that he began frequenting the local electronics store and building circuits of his own design, and he won the sixth grade science fair by making a little robot that followed a light.

Rand was never popular in school, but he did have friends and seldom felt like an outcast. The other kids thought he was weird and nerdy, but they had to admit some of the stuff he built was pretty darn cool. Although his intelligence was above average, he was never in competition for the top ranks.

With the beginning of high school came the beginning of the internet, and of course Rand was an expert before most of his classmates had even heard of it. He remembers the day of text only, command-line browsers and the heyday of usenet forums. Meanwhile, he was continuing to upgrade his own home computer system--he was able to make money by repairing people’s computers.

Rand didn’t spend quite all of his time inside. His parents encouraged him to participate in sports, and he was a decent soccer player on his high school team, but nothing special. After he graduated, he got a rather nice scholarship to Cornell to study computer science.

During his sophomore year, he met a girl named Kristen. She was a shy, nice girl, and wasn’t interested in computers beyond word processing and some internet browsing. They started dating, and stayed together for four years, and lived together for two of those years. Basically, they just grew apart; they weren’t happy together any more, and decided to go their separate ways after a few unsuccessful attempts to “fix things.” She offered to remain friends, but it was too painful to Rand, who decided to go to graduate school at NYU, far away from her. He's been there for a year now.