Daniel - My first introduction to electronics starts at my first job while in high school working as a drafter for an industrial instrumentation industry. After a couple of years there I was tasked with making some changes to a hand taped PCB layout and found it much more interesting than standard drafting. After completing my modifications the primary board designer convinced the company to invest in a license for the layout software to start learning how to do layouts on the screen. After some time I decided it might make sense to understand how electronics work so I could do better layouts. Shortly after getting my degree I was approached by the former president of the company I was working for, and who had began a new company manufacturing/selling equipment for underground tank leak detection. He offered me a job to do electro-mechanical design . There I worked on all things regards to products from the initial design to installation, writing product manuals and going on field service calls as needed. During the mid '90s I made a career change over to computer networking, but after getting back into the hobbyist world and designing things I felt to be useful it started to feel like home again. Bob was my coworker at the time and he was starting to get involved in the electronics movement; I gave him a couple of my designs to play with and it was out of his frustrations and wish list the PowerBrick was born.