Self-taught, he dropped out of college and immediately started a professional career writing arcade games. He has worked on such diverse technologies as X.25 WAN routers, virtual reality flight simulation, Postscript, and real-time digitized video-based traffic analysis. Laurence currently invests most of his time in learning the latest Java APIs and writing books about them. He thinks Java will revolutionize computer science by leveling the computing landscape into one pan-Java playing field.