In this autobiographical segment, Jack Dorsey recounts his childhood fascination with maps, which sparked a self‑taught journey into programming on early Macintosh and IBM PC systems. He describes building simple map displays, animating moving dots, and tackling the challenge of keeping those dots on realistic street paths. Leveraging his parents' police scanner, he began feeding live emergency‑vehicle data (ambulances, fire trucks, police cars) into his visualizations, simulating real‑time city movement. Dorsey also notes the emerging Internet infrastructure—gopher, BBS, and Washington University’s early backbone—that gave him access to open databases, allowing him to layer historical and live data onto his city maps. The narrative culminates in his awe at seeing a living, breathing city rendered on a screen, foreshadowing his later work on real‑time data platforms.
Chapters
When I was growing up, but it was still a joy and a wonder to me. You had skyscrapers, and you had all this hidden energy, and just walking around, you could feel something different. And that sort of love and that obsession was made most tangible by maps. I became obsessed by maps and looking at them. And I bought every Rand McNally and every single map that I could find, and I would put them in my room and hang them all over the walls and just look at them and wonder what was happening at this particular intersection or in this area or how to get down this road most efficiently. And my parents didn't know what to make of it, but I loved it. And in 1984, 1985, we got the first Macintosh and an IBM PC Junior. And I really wanted to play more with maps. I wanted to see them, I wanted to alter them more and do it on the computer screen. So I taught myself how to program because I wanted to learn how to draw a map on the screen. And then I accomplished that, and it was very, very basic and very simple. And then I put some dots on the map, and then I learned how to move. Move the dots around. And then the next challenge was to figure out how to keep the dots on the streets, because they're kind of going all over the place. And then I had all these dots moving around this beautiful picture of this map, which represented downtown St. Louis and then later represented New York City, which I was amazed by. And the issue was that none of the dots had any meaning whatsoever. They're just random dots moving around this. This city. So my parents had a CB radio, and they had a police scanner. And what was happening on the police scanner was really interesting because you had ambulances and fire trucks and police cars constantly reporting where they are and what they're doing. So I'm at 5th and Broadway in New York City. I have a patient in cardiac arrest, and we're going to St. John's Mercy. And I could take that information, type it up into a program, make some assumptions about speed and direction and what routes they're going to take, and actually watch the ambulance go to St. John's Mercy. And then I could hook up another ambulance and then a taxi cab, a police car, a fire truck. And the more and more of this I did, the more I learned how to automate more of it, because the Internet was just coming up, and we had gopher. And St. Louis, Missouri, has a school named Washington University, which was one of the first backbones for the Internet. So we had a pretty good connection through the BBS systems, the bulletin board systems back then, and I found all these open databases of this information. A lot of this was after the fact, but it was still interesting to watch and to see unfold. So now I had this picture of real live data of a real live city operating in front of me, and I just thought it was the most beautiful thing ever that I could visualize a city living and breathing.
