9781422287231 Twitter®: How Jack Dorsey Changed the Way We Communicate

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Chi ldhood Fasc inat ion

one place to another. It was not uncommon for Jack to bring his younger brothers down to the local train yard just to take pictures of the trains that were parked there. During a trip to Europe, he took hundreds of pictures of trains and payphones. COMPUTERS AND COMMUNICATION When Jack wasn’t exploring the city, he focused on the technology lying around the house. His father’s job as an engineer gave Jack access to computers before most of the other kids his age. He first began playing with computers at the age of eight, but merely using computers was not enough for him; he wanted to understand how computers worked! Jack taught himself how to build computer programs at a time when his fellow students didn’t even know how to use a computer. All this took place before he was even a teenager. Jack’s fascination with trains went hand-in- hand with his interest in technology. He decorated his room with posters of maps and trains, all the while thinking about how the city was connected in one large grid. Jack has said that if he hadn’t become so interested in computers, he might have become an urban planner instead. He began tracking the move- ment of police cars and other emergency vehicles using public information from the Internet and a special computer program he wrote himself. “Sud- denly, I had this very rich picture of what the city was doing,” he explained in an interview. “I just wanted screens and screens of these things all around my room.” Monitoring what was happening around town on computer screens was fun, but Jack wanted to get to the heart of how vehicles moved and commu- nicated. He used a police scanner to pick up radio signals transmitted from emergency vehicles moving through his area of town. The way the people in the vehicles communicated with one another fascinated Jack. “They’re always talking about where they’re going, what they’re doing, and where they currently are,” he said.