Grandfather, grandson

The other day I was pawing through my mother's closets in search of something (which I never found) but I came across some of her old albums.

There was one very large picture that I'd never seen before of my father when he was still quite young. He is the man in the middle. The photo must have been taken as a promotion shot for the company or something because the photography is very good and my father is obviously hard at work with other colleagues. Look at the one guy puffing away on his cigarette at his desk. Not a shot you would see in these days of strict smoking laws.

My father always boasted that he was one of the first computer designers and computer language inventors in America and he definitely had the mathematical smarts. In those first years the computers took up a whole building (look at that wall behind him!) and I remember him coming home with reams of encoded paper and trying to teach me binary something or other...

But the world of computers changes quickly and my father grew distant from them. He never owned his own computer and gradually his knowledge became obsolete or at least computers evolved into something he no longer understood. I once asked him a few years before he passed on, if he wouldn't like to play around with his own computer.

No. It was all beyond him by then.

My father never knew that his grandson would inherit some of his computer smarts. Like grandfather, like grandson.

Staying on top is hard work Takumi, study hard!