Biography | David Baszucki — The Quad Where a GM Scholar Finished Electrical Engineering

Stanford University accepted David Baszucki out of Eden Prairie High School as an electrical-engineering student.

He finished in 1985 as a General Motors Scholar.

The work was not only lectures. To get time on a machine he rented a terminal through the university's Low-Overhead Time-Sharing project, known on campus as LOTS.

Programming still had an analog side. Hours at a rented terminal were part of the degree.

A summer internship at General Motors put him in a lab that was trying to control car engines with software.

The Main Quad is the oldest core of the farm. Memorial Church and the sandstone arcades were already here when he walked them in the early 1980s.

This pin is the Quad, not a private room and not a current workplace.

The electrical-engineering training and the habit of building simulations on scarce computer time are the line that later runs through Interactive Physics and then Roblox.

Stanford magazine later treated the LOTS terminal as the campus version of the Apple II he had used in Minnesota.

He left the farm in 1985 with a bachelor's degree and a brother, Greg, who would co-found the first company with him four years later.

Photo: Stanford University Main Quad, May 2011, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Steve Jennings for TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0, TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, 5 September 2018.