It was the sight of the little box with the flashing lights and the tiny silver switches that turned Fred into a raving lunatic. We had all known that he was something special during freshman year, when he strolled into the Science Department with the Hewlett-Packard 65 programmable calculator strapped to his side, his long hippy-hair flowing down the back of his neck, his thick glasses amplifying those brown cow eyes, carrying that beat-up copy of Popular Electronics magazine and spouting nonsense about building our own computer. We weren't idiots; we knew that computers were huge, monstrous machines which filled entire rooms and required Doctorates to understand and operate. We'd grown up watching the video feeds from Mission Control down in Houston, seen all the cabinets full of equipment necessary to fly those spacemen to the moon. High School freshmen do not build computers. This we knew with complete confidence. But Fred was not a typical freshmen. There was and al