TRS-80, Commodore 64. Early PCs have laughable specifications by today’s standards, but they inspired a lot of creativity. Take Jacob Anderson, owner of Beyond Ordinary Software, for example. He started programming a Commodore 64 as a tween by building character management tools for his Dungeons and Dragons game. The Commodore 64 was an 8-bit machine with the Basic programming language built in. “I was 11 years old and very isolated in a small town, so I didn't really have any exposure to the outside world and everything that was happening with the whole personal computer revolution,” says Anderson. “My dad was the janitor at the middle school, so I helped him clean. One evening, he sat me down in a math classroom that had a Commodore 64-style environment, so I started playing Artillery Duel. I noticed a button on the keyboard called, ‘Run Stop,’ and if you hit that key, the program stops executing and becomes a terminal. I hit that key by accident and typed “list” and I saw all the source code. I instinctively understood everything.” His uncle subsequently helped his family buy a Commodore 64 and peripherals for Anderson, including a dot matrix printer. He became obsessed, spending nearly all his time programming. However, in high school, his progress slowed as he discovered girls and did the things high school kids do. When he went to college on a US Navy ROTC program scholarship at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), he discovered the program actually ran at The College of the Holy Cross in the evenings, which conflicted with his computer science schedule. Anderson chose to give up his three-year Navy scholarship to pursue a dual major in nuclear engineering and computer science. Since he had to figure out a way to pay for school, he got into the Science and Engineering Research Semester (SERS) program at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Applied Theoretical Physics Division, which develops novel applications of theoretical physics.  Related:At the time, Los Alamos was retiring its punch card mainframes and adopting modern software development practices. That was significant because at the time, the legacy software had been written in very old Monte Carlo N-Particle Transport Code (MCNP).  When Anderson arrived for the SERS program, his advisor was John Hendricks, a Ph.D. nuclear engineer from MIT. Hendricks had Anderson running MCNP test problems to validate the physics that the problems were testing.  “I took the SERS program to complete my major qualifying project (MQP) at WPI, which was required for graduation. However, I felt that running test problems was a waste of time, so I voiced my concerns to my WPI advisor, John Mayer, and later to John Hendricks, who didn't appreciate my attitude,” says Anderson. “As a result, I planned to leave the SERS program and return to WPI to work on a different MQP.” Related:However, before Anderson could leave, Ken Van Riper, a Ph.D. astrophysicist from Cornell, met with him.  “[Ken] appreciated my perspective and offered me a project he was working on. I proposed developing a full GUI for it, and he let me take the lead. I stayed in the SERS program and completed the project, which became MUD—MCNP User Demonstration,” says Anderson. “MUD was a 3D graphics-based problem setup tool that could create MCNP input files, run MCNP and visualize the output as particle tracks. Nobody had previously developed a complete package with a simple ‘click the button’ approach. After I graduated from WPI, [Los Alamos] hired me as staff.” Next, he went to work at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), where he found himself working for the Department of Defense (DoD) again and PRAJA, a dot-com immersive experience company. It focused on 3D visualization tracking of people in complex environments. While at PRAJA, he was the project lead on FOX NFL GameTracker 2000 and PRAJA Football 99. After that, he founded Beyond Ordinary Consulting alongside corporate roles as President of AccessQuery, a web-based job search engine, and XPLive, a SaaS company. He also served as managing partner and later managing director of Totally Evil Entertainment. Related:Important Lesson CIOs Can Learn Vicariously One thing Anderson has learned along the way is that military personnel can benefit the tech industry. “Military personnel are often highly trained, but they're focused on a very unique niche, and they own that entire niche. Whatever their operational job was, they own it. And that’s somewhat unique, because in the [civilian world], most people take a job for a little while, and then they bounce. They're very scattered when it comes to their career choices,” says Anderson. “When you deal with technical people you want them well versed in their niche job. And that's where the DoD comes in very handy, because the people who get that role are going to know it inside, out and backwards. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to hire DoD people.” Those who worked for the DoD are very regimented because they must adhere to certain policies and rules. “Military personnel understand the playing field and limitations. They’re good at limiting themselves, and they also understand large-scale systems on a worldwide scale,” says Anderson. “A defense department in any country is enormous, much larger than entities in the private sector. They know how to compartmentalize and manage complex systems. Most people have a really hard time compartmentalizing at a world scale.” However, he says cultural IQ is the most important thing CIOs and other organizational leaders must understand and use to their advantage.“Because the DoD is world scale, you get experience with different cultures, different people from different parts of the world. As a result, you must learn to understand individuals from their cultural point of view. Otherwise, you’re just going to be frustrated all the time,” says Anderson. “The military is the same. It’s important to understand the nuances and respect them so you can engage people more effectively. The military personnel who aren’t good at that wash out early. The ones that are really good at it rise.”