I don’t talk about my dad too often, actually this is my first post where I’m acknowledging him. Unfortunately he has had severe depression for the last 10 -15 years and he hasn’t dealt with it. Three months ago after my son was born it finally got in the way of our relationship and we are not currently speaking. This hurts me and is not really by my choice but it is what it is and it does not take away from the fact the my father was a great dad while we were growing up. He was a doctor and he was busy, but he was there for us and present when he was with us. I never felt neglected and I loved, and love him very much.

This said my dad is definitely a dork, not in a bad way but like me. He was into stereo electronics, was somewhat of an audiophile, and was a general hobbyist with things like electronics. He was however a little slow in moving to a computer but finally bought an Apple IIC that we had for years, actually until I went to college.

There are many things I remember about that computer but two things stand out.
1) My dad’s amazement at: what it could do, how relatively inexpensive it was even though it was extremely expensive, and his fascination taking it out of the box and putting it together. We discovered it together. I was old enough to help put the wires in the right places and really helped him figure out where things went and how to plug them in.
2) The other thing I remember is the computer didn’t have a hard drive.

It’s the lack of hard drive in the first computer that inspired this blog. That and remembering my experience with my dad. I bought a 1 terabyte external hard drive from WalMart last night for $99. I’m completely blown away that I have the much storage in such a little box and it only cost $99. When I first started working 1Tb of data was about $10,000. This is just one of those things that hit me. It’s kind of the inverse of my Dad talking to me about the movies when I was a kid.” I remember when movies cost $0.05″

I wonder is it odd that the hard drive struck me as more amazing than the iPad?

Kevin Metzger is father to Haley, Abby and Isaac and husband to Melanie. He is a Business Systems Architect and writes on tech and business topics at MetzgerBusiness.com. Kevin also writes MySpellingSucks.com for which he was awarded the 2009 East Cobber Father of the year. Recently Kevin has started TheDADvocateProject.com where he is looking for participation from dads to help write a book about this current generation of dads. Come by and fill out the DADvocate survey.

Photo Credit Dale Cruse.