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What geeky pursuits did your dad inspire you to discover?

June 17, 2011, 7:18 AM PDT

Takeaway: Join in the TechRepublic discussion about the geeky pursuits or interests your father introduced you to as a kid or as an adult.

We posed this question on TechRepublic’s Facebook page: What geeky pursuits or interests did your father introduce you to as a kid or as an adult? Here are some of the responses we received from members:

My dad inspired my gaming interest,when he bought a computer back in 1995,with PacMAN onboard:-) — Allan KaptƎn
Computers! He had one of the first personal computers ever made. But more importantly, he raised me to think out of the box and be a good troubleshooter, which certainly helps in IT! — Devora Locke
We stayed up late getting the vehicle electronics working as he explained what each part does. — Kevin Njoroge
Those electronic project kits from radio shack. — Jerry Smith
Building the TRS-80 Color Computer and playing board games from Strategy and Tactics magazine! — Andy Moon

Tell us if your father or stepfather made an indelible imprint on your introduction to geek culture.

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4 Votes

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Star Trek and James Bond

SerrJ215@... 17th Jun

My father introduced both of these to me, mostly because he was tired of watching my cartoons. Still I don't think that he ever expected these to have an effect on me. He just watched to watch something else besides transformers.

Thinking about it though, he probably wanted me to look more toward Kirk and Bond on how they acted around woman, then Q and Scotty and how they acted around computers.

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3 Votes

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Dad had the toys

ihaber 17th Jun

My dad liked to bring home the toys. My first console was an Atari 2600, first computer was a Franklin Ace 1200. I always had computers around growing up because of my dad. Kept me out of trouble a lot. He got me my own phone line cause I tied up ours with BBS use and original Prodigy. Once I got into my late twenties and needed a career, I was able to fall back into IT because of my exposure growing up. Thanks dad!

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3 Votes

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My dad is not a geek, his advice was solid, he said

Slayer_ 17th Jun

"Manual labor sucks, trade work sucks, body shop work is awful, your employers won't care about your health, your body will fall apart, you will never have a steady job, and you can never truly retire. Get a desk job instead, get smart, and get a desk job."
That's what he told me. he wouldn't even let me help him when we owned our own body shop. When we later shifted to a dealership, I helped out a bit with the small engine repair, but I was mostly in sales. Which turned out to be a good thing as it made me a personable geek. I was later hired by a company because I knew how to deal with clients on the phone and in person.

My favorite time is still that day when, apperently a dealership in Toronto, gave our phone number to one of their customers, and said we were Arctic Cat central, so I pick up the phone and suddenly this guy starts blasting my ear off about our ****** product.
So I ask "who are you" and "what did you buy from us?" and he said a quad. So I replied "We don't sell quads, we stopped selling them about 2 years ago because they were crap and we refuse to sell crap to our customers" Then he asked me if we were central. When I replied no, he seemed to turn his anger back towards that Toronto dealership. So I gave him the number of our district sales manager, I hated that guy anyways, he deserved to have his ear torn off.

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0 Votes

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Science and understanding.

AnsuGisalas 24th Jun

My dad didn't so much give me geeky pursuits, as an entire way of perceiving things.
He would always bring practical aspects to the theory, and theoretical aspects to the practice, lifting the curtain to the world beyond the world.
He was pretty good at teaching, so good it never felt like he was.

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0 Votes

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Just remember some of us had to live through the Carter years.

DHOLYER@... 23rd Jun

The only thing is today it may seem like those years were actully okay years. What would 2001 the movie look like if Kubrick had a 2010 cell phone with a nice GUI designed interface. And at the time they thought vebal communications with a computer was impossible, let alone one that could think, let alone conspire a crime.

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0 Votes

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commonly the first computer programming assignment.

DHOLYER@... 23rd Jun

Although I never took a computer programming class. I self educated my self, frpm a listing of Star Trek the TTY version written in 1974 and it educated me in 1976. That problem to be solved I recall being called the Fibernachi Series.

It is a very good introduction to the purpose of using variables to hold/store/tabulate a number to accumulate a solution. The next problem was typically to create a multiplication and addition table (aka a formatted output. The fun I had was dbase II and data base creation and formatted output. Then using data it creates to plug into vistacalc. Doing taxes was the hard thing, computers all you needed was to know how to talk to it in computerize.

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