It's a nice turn of events that the fresh-faced 15-year-old schoolboy pictured on the front page of The Canberra Times in 1965 for building a computer would go on to work in Silicon Valley and establish a software company in California, of which he is still the chief technology officer.
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But that's just how life turned out for Richard Swan, who was on the front page on June 1, 1965, with a schoolmate from Telopea Park High School, Jeremy Stanners for making a computer that played noughts and crosses and entering it at the ACT Science Teachers' school science competition.
Still working at his software company, Retail Solutions, in Mountain View, California, Mr Swan, 66, said he remembered well being on the front page of his local paper.
"At the time, my mother cut it out and I still have the cutting," he said.
"I do remember working on that project. We were working close to 24-hours a day to get that thing to work.
"We basically taught it to ourselves and I gradually got involved in more and more computer stuff. I went off to England and studied computer science as an undergraduate and then I came to the US as a PhD student and then I was a faculty member.
"Then I spent my time in Silicon Valley building software and hardware for companies like Intel and IBM."
He later founded Retail Solutions, which now has more than 350 staff in 2003.
While he was a student at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Mr Swan designed and built what was then "the largest multiprocessor of its kind in the world", something that was " a fairly straight line from the homemade "Noughts and Crosses computer".
"I have always been the happiest designing and building stuff and making it work," he said.
And that front page photograph is stark proof of how far computers have evolved.
"What I most think of is how much the technology has changed," he said.
"That was built out of scrounged parts from a telephone exchange. I think there was a telephone exchange that got burnt and some of the pieces were available for scrap and there were some other parts I bought.
"But it's all mechanical. Even a few years after that, you wouldn't do anything mechanical like that with relays and dials and switches."
Born and bred in Canberra, Mr Swan, now married with a daughter, said he had fond memories of the national capital.
"I loved Canberra. I think of it as sort of the idyllic place to grow up," he said.
