“When we opened the back panel, it revealed an amazing array of moving relays, stepper units and scanning motors worthy of vintage mechanical telephone switching equipment. I happily let my friends play the machine while I sat in the back watching the mechanism work. Eventually, I started to manipulate it, learning how the components worked. This machine taught me Boolean logic and was the genesis of my career as a software engineer.” K Lars Lohn reverse-engineers the electromechanical brain of a 1955 United Tropicana pinball machine.