Rand Dartmouth College Carlisle, Massachusetts, USA

Site Contributions
Rand was the team leader, who directed the construction of the Astronomy Interactive Network site. Some of the page testing and all of the CGI testing was performed by Rand on his web server. He wrote all the scripts for page generation.

Biography
I first became interested in computers many years ago, in 1986. That year, our family bought a computer, an XT with clock speed slower than 5 Mhz! I was taught some BASIC by my grandfather, but never really got into programming because of the extreme limitations of such a simple language.

In 1992, our family purchased a Macintosh Quadra 700, and I developed a strong interest in computers. Finally in 1994, I participated in the MIT Haystack Young Scholars Program, and was given my first shell account and SLIP access. I also was taught how to program in the C language, which was very important to my interest in computers.

From then on, I became increasingly interested in the Internet, and when I purchased my notebook computer in April 1996, I quickly installed Linux. At about the same time, I heard about ThinkQuest, and decided to enter. Then, in November, I was selected as a finalist and went to Washington D.C. My team's entry won fourth place in the mathematics and science category. The year after, 1997, I worked with Noah on another entry, this one about computer graphics. This year, I have made extensive use of CGI scripting to create a totally interactive experience for everyone.

Equipment
I used a Pentium/166 with 64 megabytes of RAM running Red Hat Linux 5.1 and Windows 95.