Nov 7 2000

While Destiny toyed with her Classic Mac, I lay on the couch reading How Did We Find Out About Computers. After a while, Destiny's curiosity led her to read over my shoulder.

"Who's that?"

"Charles Babbage."

"Oh. Babididge?"

The next page: "What's that?"

"Babbage's calculator; sort of a computer, but made of wheels & levers."

"Oh. Like my computer? With wheels?"

A few pages later: "what's that?"

"A vacuum tube...it's...hmmm....."

Better than to describe it, with a few twists of a screwdriver I had the back off a 1950s-era portable record player, and handed it's single tube to Destiny. She turned it around in her hand: "sharp!" on examining the leads. I seated the tube back in it's socket, and turned it on so Des could see it glow.

We finished Asimov's book and moved on to other children's computer-books. I pulled more bits out of storage. I lifted the dustcover of my TRS-80, to show that we had one just like in the photo. Des marveled at the enormous computers of the 1960s, and I let her unravel 10' of tape off a discarded data-reel. An illustration was of a IBM 286 motherboard, so Des got to compare the picture to the real thing: "sharp!" on examining the soldered leads on the back of the board.

5-1/4" floppies, the inside of a hard drive, handfuls of ICs, Des played with it all.