TuttleTree.com

All of this weeks guest-posts are courtesy of my Dad.

Since you?re reading this website you know that Adam spends a lot of time with TuttleTree and several other sites. He does websites for a living and never seems to get tired of this. I remember being more like that when I was younger. I could work a 12 hour day and come home to see how many of my 10 downloads actually made it over my 2400 baud modem (upgraded from 300 baud ? but we didn?t download much at that speed). On a good day I could get more than half of my new programs so I?d have something to keep me occupied for several more hours and on weekends. It was exciting for me, and looking back I think it was exciting for Adam too. Adam was always interested in what I was doing on my computer and probably a little frustrated that he couldn?t be more active. I showed him what I was doing and let him bang away on the keyboard. I explained some of the programs I was writing and how I used them to track time I spent with client projects, keep notes of my activities and stuff like that. Adam knew I had to compile my programs and that it converted my instructions to machine language, and that was cool, but it wasn?t what he was mostly interested in. Thinking back, it?s possible he was mostly interested in tracking details on the computer. My computer came from the office so I could some work at home. Since I had something to work on it wasn?t a huge priority for me, but I did see that Adam and his brothers (mostly Adam) were very interested in learning. So the search began. I started surfing through catalogs (this was before the Internet, too) and choosing the parts we?d need to build our own computer. We were way past considering a Commodore or TRS-80. I wanted to be able to work with the kids on the computer so they needed something that ran MS Windows (version 2.11?). Luck prevailed and some upgrades at work resulted in me getting an old computer for the boys to share. The boys and I spent a couple of hours going through how to turn the computer on and off, how to run programs and what programs they needed to run to do stuff. There wasn?t much on the computer but Adam asked about typing stuff in the computer and I showed him how to use Notepad. Adam never looked back. Our next problem was that we had 1 computer and 3 boys that wanted to use it. The two younger boys didn?t yet know how to read and write so there wasn?t much they could do so Adam usually got the lion?s share of computer time (that?s fair ? right?). Adam kept a diary. I don?t know what he wrote because he never chose to share it. I don?t remember what happened to that old computer or whatever became of his earliest works. I really wish I had thought to keep them. It would be interesting to know what he spent all those hours plugging away on that old beat up computer. One other thing I did that always thought was cool. I added a sound bite of a Pink Floyd song as the start up WAV file. Whenever he turned the machine on it played him this little snippet: ?Welcome my son? to the machine?. At the time it was a way of saying ?welcome to using this computer?. In retrospect, I think the ?machine? ended up being a lot more than we ever imagined.