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What geeky pursuits did your dad inspire you to discover?

My dad when I was very little bought an NES and that starting my computer and console gaming "addiction".
He was and is a Treki which I fed off of and then they took me to Star Wars when I was very young which started my love for everything Star Wars.

Since you were introduced to the Sci-Fi genre as a kid, did you ever notice the difference between Trek and Wars. Did you notice one was more realistic and the other more fantasy?

I self educated myself how to program from a program code listing of the TTY 1973 HP Basic listing, and Taught or aided the education of many students helping a friend author Star Wars - Rescue the Princess from Darth Vader on the Death Star. You could kill many a storm trooper, but in reality I think you killed far more trees since TTY-33 Terminals werew used to print on paper, or store data on 7bit Ticker tape. And at the time it was 110bps but over time increased to 1200bps, and the 7 bit ASCII text used 11bits per character so BPS/11 was the characters per second over the Bell rotary dial office phones that acoustically coupled to the modem speaker/mic hand set. Have to remember this was late 1690's tech in the mid 70's ERA. And right now I'm on a DSL T1 phone line. But those were the caveman days of computing of CompuServe and ARPA net from the DoD, and would later evolve into the Internet.

That is absolutely awesome! How did you get technology from the "1690's" to work in the "mid 70's ERA" (1670's I presume?). Have you perfected time travel to be able to comment here or do you just have a bunch of technology from the 1600's? Sorry, I had to.....

"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.

My StepDad said something similar many times. I am glad I was able to put myself through college and get a 'desk job' (though I did spend most of yesterday climbing around a construction site).

I would have to guess the geekery is genetic, though.
I didn't grow up with my other Dad around, but, as an adult, I've discovered we share a love of the same sci-fi/fantasy authors and a natural tendency to take things apart and fix them. Oh, yeah, and the poor eyesight which caused me to have to wear ugly glasses as a child, which were perpetually held together with tape of some sort.

Though both are Smart, my mother is really smart, has awards and everything, my father is a high school dropout, but some of the stuff he comes up with, some of the stuff he does, its brilliant. He even taught himself how to use a computer. I didn't even know that he hooked up his front desk computer to the internet, and was browsing naked (no virus scanner) for almost a year before I noticed. He some how managed to stay clean. For being uneducated, hes really smart.

So did you parents even know what a D, C,A,AA,AAA dry cell battery was? And could they comprehend what or why you needed frequency channel chips to talk on the 40 different channels on your hand held walkie-talkies. Did they know what an Atom was? And that it was made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. And if they did could they understand that they were made of Quarks of 6 varities. Or was that to deep into subatomic particles. And that is leaving out the hundred or more other subatomic particles, let alone anti-matter. Could I blow their minds by just bringing up the concept of time measured to the Plank time moment of 37 zero's followed by numbers or that the big bang was some 13.7 billion years ago and for the first 400,000 years matter was still emery, and time was not really measurable let a quark or even a atom be formed.
I could dig even deeper into modern tech but ant deeper would be going to deep.

You could walk the Planck.

My dad was a lifer IBM'er. 35 Years and retired in 1986. The components he would bid on at the university were awesome for do it yourself projects to build different functional pieces. The first piece we built was a calculator that used binary with switches and lights...the rest just went from there.

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.

i'm pregeek. honesty,truthfull,responceable,independence. can't spell or type worth a damn.

My dad started the first high school computer science curriculum (then Data Processing) at Hutchinson Central Technical High School in the 60s. My first exposure was an after school class he taught at Hutch-Tech back in 1968. Cut my teeth on Fortran and an IBM 1130 with 16K of memory! Still coding, learning and being geeky 43 years later. Thanks, dad!

Mt Dad was a very active Ham Radio operator and used only "home brew" equipment. At age 6, I was introduced to the idea and it was history. It has been the mainstay of my life and always find it fascinating. Dad was a great teacher without ever "teaching" anything!!!

My dad went to work after high-school doing roadbed work for the railroad in central Texas....he tole me that he had NEVER worked so hard in his life, and was convinced that he could do better. Newly married, he went to work build B-36 bombers at the Convair plant in Ft. Worth, Tx, went to school at night, and got a job as something called a field-engineer for a little company called IBM. His career took him all around the country with defense and eventually NASA assignments, spending a LOT of time away from his family....but doing important work. He INSISTED I go to college, but didn't advise regarding careers. Still, I spent my USAF career in C4I systems and continue to do IS and IA work.

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!

My dad was a Fire Control Technician on a USN cruiser. I didn't learn until I was older that meant he handled radar and firing of guided missiles, he was not a fireman. When he retired he went into TV repair, which in those days meant replacing tubes and such. My first job with him was to carry a bag of tubes to the local drugstore once a week and use the tester they had by the front door. We fixed every set on the block, usually for a slice of pie.

Ok, ok
My Dad introduced me to the TYPEWRITER insisting it was an essential tool for survival in the modern world!
I assembled, with a engineer buddy, my first computer in 1973. Prior to that I had one year of programming in university - the cards were punched on our local campus and sent by mail to the main campus for processing.

In my youth we did science and entertainment persuits which I guess you would now call geeky. So heres a random list off the top of my head Brewing Ginger Beer, Making lead objects by pouring molten lead into plaster of Paris molds, Chemistry sets, Making your own gunpowder and fireworks, Mechano, Steam engines, collecting fossils, naming wild flowers, astronomy through a small telescope - you could at least see the Orion nebula and Andromeda, growing stuff, shortwave radio listening, building electrical circuits - the lead solder splashes ruined the carpet in my room. I didnt see my first apple pc until I was at university so I imagine todays geeky persuits might be somewhat different.