Today is my father's birthday. He was born on the 4th of March in 1924. His time was so very, very different from this age, even though it's only been fifteen years since he died, and I've been thinking a lot lately of how much he would have liked 2007.

Although he grew up milking cows by hand and could vividly recall his parents' first Model T Ford ... he had a story about having to drive backwards up a steep slope because the old cars relied on gravity to get the gas where it needed to be ... he was quick to adopt technology that suited him and was as much a man of the times as any, no matter what that time was.

One Christmas in the early 1980's, my brothers and I all chipped in to buy him his first computer, a big, clunky Zenith something or other that recorded on five-inch-floppies and had a memory in the low hundreds of k. He loved it, and filled disk after disk with letters, stories, poetry, and dozens of drafts of a couple of books.

The oldest of my brothers is a science guy, a university professor, and a methodical man who gets things done, eventually. He started out with the same computer we bought my dad, and because of this as much as any other reason inherited those five-inch-floppies.

It turns out that he'd kept his original computer specifically for use with these disks, and over the years he's been going through them one-by-one. Here's what he had to say about them:

It was a real pain dealing with these old documents, on 5 inch floppies no less.

I had retained my original computer, an ancient Zenith PC--in fact, I believe it was only the second model of PC that had yet been produced--just for this purpose. The computer was necessary because Dad used this word processing
program, PFS Write, which is no longer available. You can import the files into Word, but any unusual formatting resulted in gibberish ... and I went through the documents page by page, correcting the gibberish.

... Truth be told, however, I simply didn't want to look at the stuff because it was too depressing. So that computer sat on a shelf, and every time I looked at it, I would get this sinking feeling. I finally decided recently to bite the bullet
and deal with it. The Zenith is now in the back of my car; the Information Technology people in our school want it for their museum.

Funny that Dad mentions in one of those letters that he heard news that a company was to produce a laptop computer, and he said he would like to have one.

He would have loved to explore the internet.

Yes, my wonderful brother sent me an amazing gift: eight-six pages of notes from my father. Some things I'd seen, some I have hard copies of, but others were brand new to me.

So, for Dad's birthday this year I get to spend time with parts of him I've never known before, which after fifteen years is an experience I certainly didn't expect.

What a treasure.