She also fiddled with its parts and components, burning the thing out a bunch of times. “I’d take knives and forks and kind of scrape it against the pins in the back.”Įventually she learned BASIC and started to get the old Commodore to do different things. “I would type on it like, ‘draw house,’ and it would return a syntax error. “I would spend hours in front of the computer, just typing on the keyboard, trying to get it to do things,” she said. She still didn’t know how to do anything, but that didn’t stop her from trying. When she discovered computers, first a TI-99/4A at a friend’s house and then later a Commodore 64 her dad bought her, Ellsworth’s interests shifted to a different sort of invention: programming. She would just hammer parts of different things together. Initially her inventions weren’t really inventions at all. So I became very fascinated with building and inventing things.” “I would just tear it apart and, at some point, I would start putting stuff back together in different ways, like just changing the color of the LEDs. “It was to keep me from dismantling everything in the home,” she said. Partly out of that support and partly as a form of home appliance self-defense, her dad placed a box at the service station asking for donations of broken electronics. “Please don’t tell my dad, but I think this is the part that I broke.”įortunately, her dad was the sort who went out of his way to support his daughter’s growing interests. “I knew I broke it and I knew my dad had to take it in to get it serviced, so I put a little note inside for the technician to find, like, ‘Please don’t tell my dad, but I think this is the part that I broke,’” and then I closed it up.”Įllsworth was right, but the technician told her dad anyway. “One time, I took apart a VCR and looked inside it and broke it,” she said. “I was really fascinated, much to the frustration of my father, because a lot of times I couldn’t get my toys back together.Īs her skills grew, the first thing she learned to do was reassemble things - perhaps not correctly, but at least so they looked like they hadn’t been taken apart. “I was out there trying to get the screws out of the thing,” she said. She still remembers her first attempt at disassembly: an old stove from the kitchen that her dad had tossed out back in a junk pile. It’s also where she started to develop her lifelong, well, call it an obsession, with taking things apart and putting them back together again. Growing up on a farm in “the middle of nowhere” (in this case, “nowhere” was a little Oregon town called Dallas), Ellsworth didn’t have much to do with her time as the daughter of a widowed gas station mechanic. “I spent a lot of time just kind of on my own, in the library. “I got really fascinated with how things work,” she said. With the consumer release of a new CastAR headset less than a year away, I sat down with Ellsworth to chat about the company and how she came to help launch it. And as CastAR co-founder, she’s also one of two innovators fueling what may be the first release of a major consumer-friendly augmented reality headset. Today, Ellsworth is known as a preeminent classic hacker, modding and brute-forcing her way to success. Without formal training, without a high school diploma, Ellsworth MacGyvered her way through childhood and into an industry not only reluctant to welcome women, but not really designed for an autodidact. Flame-throwing race car driver, circuit board hacker, computer store chain founder, toy maker, game tweaker, car builder: Before co-founding her own augmented reality headset company, Jeri Ellsworth was a technology chameleon, finding niches in electronics and mechanics, mastering them and helping redefine how they worked.
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