When your kids show passion, don’t kill it because it doesn’t meet your expectations.

Parents, do let your children grow up to be cowboys — if that’s what they truly want to be.

Now, I’m not religious, but when I was 12 or 13, living in Garland Texas, I was touched by the hand of God… or something.

I had just gone to the movies, although I cannot tell you the movie I just watched, but I think it was Corvette Summer, and then I stumbled into the Radio Shack next to the theater, in a strip mall that I believe no longer exists.

On the table near the front window was a TRS-80 Model 1 desktop computer, complete with memory expansion and monochrome display. Not knowing what this contraption was, I started asking questions to the equally flummoxed sales people.

As luck would have it, a few manuals came with the Model 1, and I began to look at them. It seemed like the words spoke to me in a way no other book had, I didn't even have to read them because I was absorbing them, somehow.

After an hour or so, I was loading up one of the cassette tapes that came with the floor model into the tape cassette player that it came with. The program on the tape was “Eliza”, and it was supposed to be an artificially intelligent implementation of a poorly trained psychologist.

What was notable was not the program, but what happened when I accidentally hit the Break key. Faced with the following prompt:

Radio Shack Level I Basic
Ready
>

I intuitively typed “help” and hit the ridiculously large Enter key.

What followed was several hours of what can only be explained as “euphoria”. I was Lewis and Clark, clearing one ridge of unexplored territory, only to find a new ridge to trek to just at the horizon.

Soon, I found myself looking at the BASIC code for Eliza. Each line was a puzzle to be solved, and each puzzle a piece of a larger puzzle. My mind abuzz, I simply could not stop.

I was addicted. Instantly.

I remember the walk home after the store manager, not sure what I was doing, pushed me out the door and told me to come back… again… some time.

BASIC was now part of my psyche.

My dad, however, did *not* approve of how much time I was spending writing code on paper, and said “you better get your priorities straight, young man.”

That summer, I had started a lawn mowing “business”, and was mowing two or three lawns per day for spending money, and spending pretty much all of the balance of my time aggravating the manager of the Radio Shack, until I struck a deal with him. I would help him sell the computers in exchange for computer time. He saw that my enthusiasm was contagious, and the he sed the notion that if this freckled, red-haired kid could figure it out, anyone could, to his great advantage.

Radio Shack in Garland sold a lot of computers that summer, and I got more computer time than probably anyone did, punching in code I had written on paper, nearly wearing out the Break key when it didn’t do what I wanted it to. I may have made more money in that summer than my dad did, but I really didn’t keep track, but he was working harder than I’ve ever seen… That’s just the way my father is.

My dad finally came around, realizing he didn’t have enough time in his day to overcome my desire to become a software developer. I suspect he wanted me to walk in his footsteps, which I tried for a couple years later on in life, but logistics management just wasn’t for me because it had too much of a human element, which I found too chaotic and unpredictable.

Most of all, though, I’m glad my parents let me go in the direction I felt I needed to go, and didn’t push me based on their expectations. It has made all the difference.

Thanks mom & dad :)

p.s. Dad’s 84 now and still working away in logistics in Knoxville, TN. We lost mom in 2004, God rest her soul.