Memories of Dad...

Happy Father's Day

My father Jim, passed back in 1994....  It was traumatic to me, as he was the corner post of my learning experiences in life...

Dad was in the Navy in WWII and was a fire control technician.  They were the fellows that calculated the firing solutions for the big guns aboard the cruiser he was stationed upon...

They used mechanical computers that had wheels and gears to do the math involved...  At that time they had vacuum tube computers but they were too large to put aboard ship...

In the 1950s and 1960s we ran an electronics parts store in Des Moines selling everything it took to make radios and tv s.   He understood all of this electronics stuff and taught most of it to me...  But when I went to college, I became an accountant, as it was far easier to get a job in that field in the 70s...

I think my mother really enjoyed that fact as she had been the bookkeeper in the business and I helped her as well...

Dad built computers from small kits in the early 1980s as retirement projects.  I remember one of his first machines had 4 K of memory....  That would be 4,000 positions of 8 bit wide memory....  The machine I am typing on right now has 2 Gig of memory...  That's 2,000,000,000 positions, and is rather small compared to the little laptop I purchased this spring as it has 8 Gig..

We used a small tape recorder to store programs and copied them into the memory of the machine with a modem at 150 baud...  Modems today are rated in the millions of baud........  bits per second...

I think it would almost be beyond dad's ability to comprehend the electronics of today, but you could bet he would have one of the biggest computers around were he still alive...

He never did like the desktop overlay programs like windows because he always worked from the command line..  Do you suppose that is why I still use linux today...?

Anyway Happy Father's Day!!

Retired Rod