When my mom and dad died about 15 years ago, I found my mom had packed it away carefully. It's now in the closet alongside the MIB Lego Millenium Falcon, waiting for my little guy to get a few years older.

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He was really responsive to the question asked. Instead of just listing some cool gadgets he remembered, he really told a story. I feel like I came away knowing him better than I would after most interviews.

Thanks Woz!

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The tactile feel of things really helps me connect to something. I remember the sort of squeaky feedback of the Atari 2600 joystick, the clicky feedback of the joystick on my C64, and the satisfying cachunk of a manual frame advance on my old Pentax SLR.

Tactile feedback is important to me. It assures me that something is happening. It might be the click-click-click of an actual jog dial or the subtle hum of a whirring drive. I want to feel that feedback. That's where a lot of my memories are.

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As a kid, I'd take a phone recording pickup coil and plug it into a mini cassette recorder with headphones, and I'd go around and listen to the different EM radiation in the house - find where wires ran in the walls, compare the tones I'd hear in incandescent and fluorescent bulbs, etc... geeky stuff.

My current watch is decidedly low-tech, but still plenty gadgety... after a lifetime of wearing accurate, indestructable Timexes, I've started wearing mechanical skeleton watches - check eBay for dozens - you can see the mainspring coil up as you wind it, and watch the balance wheel swing back and forth, flexing its hairspring, rocking the pallet fork back and forth on the escape wheel, etc... it's really hypnotic. Mechanical watches tend to lose or gain a few seconds per DAY though! I find this isn't a problem since I see the time on so many accurate digital devices in a day as it is, so I can keep it set properly...

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My most meaningful gadget was problem an IBM PC Junior. The specs were way low end (single sided floppy with 360k, no hard drive, 128k of ram) but it came with a word processor and I found a spreadsheet that would run on it plus lots of games. But what most paved the way to my career for me was I could run an assembler on it (masm? I don't remember).

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Oh, wait, he does. Forget it.

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