Part 3
“Dave the Math Daddy” has an unfair edge, now. Growing up as a small kid in a city and having only one continuous eyebrow was an unfair disadvantage when riding the city bus, but it sure did help when we had spelling bees and math projects.
I LOVED math! Credit to my teachers, Sr. Maureen and Mr. Godialis, and then Sr. Patrice Garrity. Math was fun and easy and made sense. It was relational but not complicated, and the same operation predicably returned the expected response every time. Much, MUCH easier to understand than the boy-girl interactions that precipitated in grade school.
High school was at an all-boys Prep school where I hung out part time with the chess and computer guys, and then tried to run off my energy in soccer and rugby. Jesuit school was good to me, and Coach Brosley, Maureen Bohan, “Skid” Rowe, and Ralph Langanke laid the math foundation for me for a career in engineering, while Joe Peters and Tony Canuel got me in shape in the science and engineering arena.
My friends and I were at the perfect age when the Gary Gygax dice-based games came along, and we played them. I mean we really PLAYED them! What else were you going to do in an all-boys school, until you get a little older and remember that you also happen to be sitting on a coed college campus! Well, that does not pertain to this story and will have to be saved for another day.
So in the early and mid-eighties, my brother and I would be walking around in our bullet-proof unfaded Levis jeans, maybe with a protractor or slide rule hidden in some pocket, and my Dad, an engineer at GE world headquarters, starts the Computer Learning Center, and teaches all the gurus how to use the computer. The fallout is that he is bringing home for us to play upon all the coolest gadets. A mini-batch-card-reading calculator on which you can play lunar lander and wumpus, a 64k kaypro portable computer which we made all sorts of our own games and found ways to get more from trading or buying. By the time I head to UConn in 1985 I have saved up my lawn cutting money and bought one of the first PC clones, an 8088 machine that cost me over 1200 clams!
But I made most of it back typing term papers for the English majors and others would could not type. Learned a bit that way too.
Stay tuned for the continuation of the blog in Part 4…
