http://www.thinkgeek.com/
But I thought I'd share my follow-up story with the rest of the world, too!
---
Daddy doesn't live here no' mo'.
Sad, but true. My father has been geographically severed from me for nearly a decade now. Oh, we still talk -- we have email and MSN and social-networking sites and we both maintain our own personal blog-like websites... but it's not the same; it can't be the same.
My father brought me to the internet. He, in fact, brought the internet to an entire community, several counties. It was pre-1992 and the World Wide Web was still on the horizon, but after several years of both accessing and running BBS's on the local and global scale, we knew what was out there and we knew we wanted a piece. My father looked at the infrastructure of our small-town in the southern Ontario area and said "this simply wont do!" He put together a group of computer enthusiasts and one financial backer and together they began the first dial-up ISP servicing three large counties (Dufferin-Wellington, Simcoe, Grey-Bruce).
I can remember driving down a back country road with friends and being able to point at a brown junction box and announce "That, right there, is where fiber stops." High-speed was a thing of the future, but that didn't mean people living in small towns should be denied access to e-mail, newsgroups, archie and gopher (does anyone even remember what those are?!) or IRC.
We all take it for granted that wherever we live we are going to have internet access. Kindle even purports to give you free access no matter where you are on the globe. This was most-certainly not always the case! Tell that to a 10 year old today and they will have a hard time fathoming it -- oh, they'll _believe_ you, because the have wiki and can suss out the truth for themselves, but they wont fully comprehend it!
My dad is the guy who brought the internet to hundreds of thousands of people back before they even knew what it was -- so maybe it would be better to say he brought the people TO the 'net.
I love our digital connection. I love that I can keep in touch with his life and keep him updated on mine; that he can see current pictures of his grand-daughter mere moments after I take them. That being said, each year that passes where I don't get to visit him on father's day, I'm glad that the digital world only sees what I choose to share with it and I can hide my real-world tears one more time.
I love you daddy. I miss you. Happy father's day!
No comments:
Post a Comment