Neal grew up on a small family farm, the second of five children, in the postwar decade of the fifties. His mother, an army nurse, and his father a medic, met in the Philippines and settled in the Pacific Northwest at the end of WW II. As a young adult, he participated in the protest and hippie movement of the late sixties and co-owned a head shop. After graduating from college Neal worked as a computer programmer, and later as a systems and network manager, giving him a first hand view of a thirty year technological revolution that changed society and our political system in ways that were unimaginable to its creators.