In sharing information with my dentist regarding how much I value the web site linking my wife and I to our grandson’s continual development at his ripe old age of 14 months now, and how the good doc can do the same for his far-away family, I had yet another reminder of how the environment influences our youth.        Though it is certainly no guarantee of future interests or behaviors, when I look at our three sons’ manner of making a living, I can certainly offer support to those who preach that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. 

During the days when our oldest son was playing youth soccer in the falling snow of North Dakota (I remember watching some of his games while sitting in the car, heater and defroster running and windshield wipers swooshing — the field was converted into an ice skating rink after the last game of the season), I souped up my entry into the personal side of technology, a Radio Shack TRS-80 personal computer. The entire computer resided in the keyboard and the data storage device was an audio cassette player/recorder. #1 son read aloud the BASIC programs published in monthly magazines as I typed them into the computer, and if I couldn’t troubleshoot the errors we waited until next month’s edition for the error corrections. Such was the home in which #1 son lived. 

Later, when we lived in California and he was in high school, we lived with the frequent sound of modem connection and handshake signals as users logged on to my bulletin board, “The Eagle’s Nest” (note the singular). This was of course before the Internet as we know it today, and to give you an idea of the number of denizens of the modem users’ underworld in the Riverside, CA area, we all fit nicely into a corner of Denny’s on an occasional Saturday morning face-to-face. There has been no time since then that we have been without personal computer power in the home. #2 son and #3 son have never lived in a home without a computer. A personal computer was as much a part of their world as a toaster in the kitchen. Portable computers (no, not “laptops;” they were “portable” only because they could conceivably be carried by less than a lumberjack, but not far) were the newest thing, and 2400 baud (Wow! 2400?!!) modems were a screaming rage when #2 came along. 

By the time #3 was about, a closet of spare cables, printer ribbons, parts catalogs, and a tremendous store of various parts and pieces was as normal in our home as a closet of clothes. We had already exceeded several boxes’ capacities and needed a closet with shelves. The decline of dot matrix printers and the advent of inkjet and laser printers is in our sons’ developmental memory banks. And what are those boys, oops, excuse me, men, doing today? Each of them is very much into technology, each in his own way different from the other two, but firmly entrenched in that world of high tech as a means of making a living. 

Is there a cause and effect relationship between the world at home in which they grew up and what they have chosen as their livelihood of today? I don’t know. Of course with the number of technology-related jobs of today the odds are decent that they may have gravitated in that direction anyway, but the thought that the home environment has odds at least equal to chance, well, it makes me hope they remember more of the good lessons by example than the more questionable ones. Let’s face it — like it or not, realizing it or not, parents are teaching 24/7 and that’s a risky proposition. 

No tree is perfect. One might hope that the fruit are better than the tree. At least #2 son has that web site that allows us to see and hear our grandson. It’s not the same as being there, but it sure beats an occasional letter or a phone call.
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Related trivia: Our CPU memory –
Original, 4K (yes, “K”, and that was an upgrade from the stock 2K)
Current, 2.5 gig 

Modem speeds we used at home: 300, 1200, 2400, 3600, each as it became available
Modem speed now: whatever the cap is on our cable modem  Currently beyond the PC –
Our laptop, notebook, scanner, optical wireless mice, voice recognition software, digital cameras, TV tuner card in the PC, second monitor, and other things we take for granted and can’t think of as “extras,” none of which existed in those early days