Why Rambling? Why Raving?

In 1981, Dad took me along for a major purchase. It was an IBM PC, bought from the Sears Computer Store, and cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000. It had one 400K floppy drive, a monochrome monitor, and 64k of RAM. He didn't quite know what he was going to do with this new personal computer, but he knew that he had to have one. He had witnessed the great vacuum tube mainframes in the '50s and '60s and was thrilled to have all this processing power at his fingertips.

I was tasked with assembling the components and navigating the subtle intricacies of DOS. Having taken a BASIC programming elective in grammar school, he promoted me to PC guru. I helped him set up a very expensive database application to print mailing labels and learned the ins and outs of VisiCalc. He and I joined the Diablo Valley PC Users' Group and attended their weekly meetings. After a few years, the PC was retired from business use and became our first home computer. I used it to create my reports for school and even a few creative writing exercises. He never took to it very keenly, but every once in a while I'd hear him at the desk upstairs, late at night, pecking away at the keyboard. Eventually he let me in on his project. It was a journal of sorts of whatever happened to be in his head as he sat to compose. Stories from growing up in the Depression, of his brother during WWII, of his ever-growing family. His idea was to get enough stories together to eventually pull them together and share with the rest of the family. He titled the file "Ramblings and Ravings."

I recently told this story to my sister, who responded "Our dad invented the Blog!" Of course, it pre-dated the web by about 7 years, but that's just a technicality.

I've been thinking about that file a lot lately, wondering if it may exist on some floppy disk laying around somewhere. It may be wishful thinking to imagine that I'll ever recover it, but I have hope. In the meantime, I hope this blog can grow and exist in the same spirit as the original Ramblings and Ravings. More to come.