March 10, 2003
My father refuses to connect his computer to the Internet. Not for email, not for the Web, not for anything. Because he's computer-ignorant? Hardly, he was a programmer for many years. In that time, though, he developed a healthy paranoia about networking. Maybe because he worked on a lot of highly sensitive military projects, which skewed his perspective (or enlightened it, depending on your perspective). Donno. Either way, the only time we had his blessing for a computer in our house to connect to an external machine was when I was a little kid and he connected to the mainframe at work to do work-related things and to let me play games. (That, by the way, is how I learned to type, read, and play blackjack all at the same time.)
Mind you, we did it anyway. My younger brother ran a BBS or two on the sly (housed at a friend's place), and I spent a whole lotta time on local BBS, Usenet, and Fidonet. We just did it with our own computers late at night, when Dad wouldn't notice the phone line tied up.
All that was years ago, before the Internet exploded into public consciousness, and my dad still doesn't connect up. Considering this is how I make my living, I view this with an odd mixture of bemusement and respect.
When I read this email message from Nathan Steiner's father, I thought that maybe it's a very good thing that my dad remains an Internet hermit. At least I don't get email like this. Just the occasional weirdly erudite voicemail, quoting from Genesis to support or criticize something or other. Then I got to thinking that my dad would never write email like that. It's more like something I would do.
Oh god. I'm going to write things like this to my son.
