“Tom grew up in rural South Carolina and mostly stayed at home writing video games on his Apple II. There was no place nearby to go to high school. He took a few community college classes but none of those places could give him a high school degree. It didn't really matter - all he wanted to do was program computers. So when it came time to apply to college, Tom just printed out a pile of code he wrote and sent it to colleges. ¶ Stanford, Berkeley and everyone else summarily dismissed his application on technical grounds - he didn't have a high school diploma. ¶ MIT looked at his code and said, "we like it" - we accept you.” - × × ×