Some dates in this timeline are more vague than others…this one is at the wild guess end of the spectrum.
Scott’s dad, Aleck, was interested in day trading…this is a type of stock market trading where you get in and out in a single day. Scott, who worshiped his dad, naturally followed in his footsteps. My only early memory of this is based on being invited to sit in on a class they were attending in the Seattle area that taught people how to use a personal computer to buy and sell stock. This was technically interesting to me, but at the time I had other ways go lose my money, so I didn’t get involved.
But Scott remained interested in day trading for the rest of his life, and every few years he would dig back into the process of writing code to automate the process. After a year or so of playing with it he usually put the idea on the back burner to simmer, saying that the data feeds he could get were too slow or the computers available were too slow, or the big companies were sitting on the feed, skimming too much off the top.
Ironically, shortly before his death, this again became his main focus. He told me that the time was finally right…the feeds and the hardware and the software were finally just right.