My parents were very strict. They thought boarding school would do me good. So, when I was about seven, I was put in one in India for a while.

I think I was the first kid in my elementary school to turn in a word-processed document. I just enjoyed using the stuff. It was sort of lying around, and I got to play with it. I had an older brother who was interested in it as well. So I think I had kind of a unique environment, that most people didn't have, because my dad was willing to spend all his available income on buying a computer or whatever.

I just sort of kept having ideas. We had a lot of magazines lying around our house. It was kind of messy. So you kind of read stuff all the time, and I would read Popular Science and things like that. I just got interested in stuff, I guess, technology and how devices work.

I belong to a family of boys who were raised in meager circumstances in central Kansas, and every one of us earned our way as we went along, and it never occurred to us that we were poor, but we were.

I was raised in a super-sheltered atmosphere where we didn't watch anything besides Trinity Broadcasting Network - which was called TBN - or the Fox News channel.

I grew up in Denton, east Manchester, and was raised by my late father, Reg, a barber.