A Filipina Mom Blogger

A magazine writer once asked me if I considered myself a “geek”. Musing over the question, I hemmed and hawed “Isn’t the geek label reserved for the less than 40 year olds? ” With a slight hint of embarassment I mulled over the question again and affirmed that yes, I am a geek , an enthusiast in technology. If I were not excited about technology, I don’t think I would have been in the E-commerce industry or even blogging here today. I shouldn’t be ashamed to admit being a geek. I believe this quote is how I feel about geekiness,

“ Being a Geek is not about how much you know or how much you have achieved. Its about the spirit of trying to learn something new all the time.
— Kaustubh Srikanth

I was a groovy teenager in the seventies. Technology fascinated me ever since I got my first calculator when I was 15 years old in 1973. My mom bought it in Hongkong for 1,000 pesos ($20.00) but mind you , the starting salary of fresh graduates was 500 pesos ($10). I still remember the heavy chunky box with green dotted numbers on the screen. Having the calculator then felt like having your own laptop today.

Then Pong arrived in our TV room in 1975.

PONG is a video game based on the sport of table tennis, and named after the sound generated by the circuitry when the ball is hit. Just like the game consoles of today’s generation, the Pong was attached to the TV. Oh the novelty of a video game right there at the living room! Parties at home were never a dull moment. I often tell my daughters that Pong was all I had in high school as I watch them play with the colorful figures in their Playstation.

My next encounter with home technology was the TRS - 80 microcomputer in 1979 when I was 20 years old.

TRS-80 was Tandy Corporation’s desktop microcomputer model line in the late-1970s. I remember how user data was stored on cassette tape. The tapes were often so fragile that I’d splice and tape them back together with “scotch tape”. The first computer language I dabbled with my siblings was BASIC which we learned through a manual. How delighted we were when we got the computer to say “hello”. I didn’t own the TRS 80 since dad bought it for our home business. To his utter disappointment, he scolded us for using it to play games. He insisted ” The computer is for business”

“But dad, we need to play first to see how this computer works” we protested.

True indeed, my brother then developed his own software (I forgot the name) for our bakery business. He became one of the first teachers to teach computer programming in Cebu.

See, we need to allow our kids a fair amount of play time and sooner or later they can transform play into productive use.

My next encounter with technology was the lone IBM Clone PC XT at my office in UP-Institute for Small Scale Industries in 1983. It was quite disappointing to see it often used to play Pac-man , the same Pac-Man running around a maze, eating pac-dots. Being a workaholic during those days, I wanted to work on my dbase, a software which I needed for my survey results.

From 1985 and onwards, I lost track of the computer specifications and the gadgets I’ve owned. Rapid changes followed. I discovered the internet in 1995 , new operating system and a thousand and one other technologies since I first played with microcomputers in 1979. I may not be a geek in the eyes of today’s youth since I rely on my children’s request to buy this or that new gizmo they are dying to own.Yes, I buy a few. Dabbling with gadgets make me feel young, in tune with today’s generation.

There have been geek parents before - even long before the label , geek applied to them. The main difference is that somehow when the world turned upside down and it became chic to be a geek…the geeks took it one step higher, and as they stepped into parenthood, they made it cool to be a parent.