Best Memory of Dad - Happy Father’s Day

Posted on | June 15, 2008 |

“Would you like to see what I do when I go to work?” After I finished peeing all over myself, I raced out to the car. Dad was taking me to LTV (aerospace company in Dallas, TX). I knew he did something with these things called computers, and I had no idea what that meant. I received the full treatment - guest badge and all. I got to sit at Dad’s desk, call Mom (just like he did), and even write all over the walls (two of the walls in his office were dry-erase boards). I got to write all over this cool green-and-white striped paper, and draw funny boxes and triangles using these really cool green stencils that had “IBM” on them.

Then the moment that sealed my professional fate. I got to go into the computer room. Just like the gal in the picture, I got to sit at a teletype terminal, and play a game on the computer. I got to load a tape onto a tape drive, and see where the disk drives were. I was in heaven. The soft hum of the A/C system, the whir of the disk drives, the zzzt-zzzt of the tape drives, the smell of the room - I can remember it all like it was yesterday. The icing on the cake - I got to take a stack of cards from the card punch home with me. Years later, when I found a box of unused cards from an old card punch when I started working at IBM, no one could figure out why I was so excited, and I had a hard time telling them, since I had instantly been transformed back into an over-stimulated 7-yr old geek.

Thanks for making that day special, Dad. I hope the mainframes in Heaven are even more fun. Happy Father’s Day, fellow dads.