Daughter of Homemade Joysticks

I know I have been lazy lately about posting, so please accept my apology for being even lazier by re-posting a comment I just made in the wondrous Andy Hardy blog.  (If you haven't been keeping up on his posts, shame on you.)

In reference to his ode to Macs on their 21st Birthday, I wrote this:

“I admit that people who love Macs are very much like cult members or fetishists. I’m sure PC people want to sink into the ground when they see us coming because they know we’re about to launch into one of our smug speeches on the inherent superiority of the Macintosh.”

I’ve always referred to this as “Macatitude”, the rather obnoxious behavior that can sometimes beset someone who suddenly finds themselves wanting to place the Apple decal that came with the Mac on their car. (The car being, in most cases, a new VW Beetle.)

I should add though, I grew up with Apples and still have a 5 ¼ inch disk signed by no other than Steve Wozniak himself.  My father, (in what I always thought was an act of rebellion against his father who designed mainframes for IBM from the 1950’s until his retirement in the 1990’s), brought home our first Apple II+ in the late 70’s making our family the first in the area to have a home computer. Even though my sister and I always feel asleep when he tried to teach us “Logo”, the children’s programming language, I have always been grateful that my father made sure we were always comfortable around technology.  (Although I wished that feeling would have extended to childhood horror of having father who made our computer joysticks for games while all the other kids had “real” store bought ones.)

This is how I have been lately, and why I haven't been posting. Other blogs stay cool, but I am still just the girl who had to live down homemade joysticks. 

Bright and sunny in LA and I'm drabber than ever.  (Drabber. Dictionary.com for some reason lists the second meaning of the word first.  Odd.)

At least it looks like Devin in NYC feels that time is speeding up.

Comments

[Danny]

Thanks for posting on my blog and oh my God, I hope that Steve Wozniak-signed floppy is encased in Lucite and hanging over your mantle! My dad was also an early technophile--we had the first "portable" video equipment in our neighborhood (it weighed about two tons!). Black and white, reel-to-reel, and each half-hour tape costs $40 so it costs us $160 to tape one movie off the TV!

I am envious of your homemade joysticks--did your computer make you as popular as our early video camera made us?

[ShubbaDubba]

Funny enough, I like to make game controller extensions out of extra wire that my dad had lying around for various bizarre electrical contraptions he was always in the process of building. Typically these were hardly safe or even effective at lengthing my controllers from the TV-- and besides, I kind of liked sitting two-feet away from the 27" screen radiating all kinds of microwaves into my gentle, young, maleable brain.

My dad bought one of the very first Atari 2600's ever offered to the public. I admit that some kid's were be-bopping around with the Commodore 64's for a few years, but man! I had Pole Position! And that rad Indiana Jones game, too!

Wait. What? Mac's? What're those?

[otherpeoplesblogs]

Unfortunately, the computer didn't do much to help my social life as a kid. I am glad to hear that at least someone was helped by their "early adaptor" fathers!

The closest my father's geekiness ever helped me was at a sleep over in the fourth grade. We had one of the early cordless phones, which all the girls loved because they could sneak off and hide in a closest when they called the boy of their choice. It got even better, when my father showed that he could pick up the phone conversation on his shortwave radio and broadcast the conversation in our living room.

One boy conversation later, and there was a fourth grade girl melee in our house!