Don Mitchell

Since junior high, my planned career had been physics, but in 10 grade, our high school got a teletype connection to a CDC 6600 computer, and without completely realizing it, computers became my real passion. In 1981, two years into a graduate program in physics at Caltech, I accepted a job in a computer research department at AT&T Bell Laboratories. After working on computer graphics and image processing for over ten years, I went to Princeton University to do additional research with a good friend who had recently joined their faculty. I got an MS degree in computer science there and finished most of the work toward a PhD, but once again I dropped out of school to take an interesting job in computer research. Lately, I have been researching the Soviet space program, with a particular emphasis on their exploration of the planet Venus.