Beginnings in Technology

I have been surrounded by technology from a very young age because my father was a air traffic controller. He would frequently take us up into the air traffic tower and show us how to read the radar screens and the teletype messages that travel between the tower and the radar room. We also traveled by airplane all of the time, I made my first flight when I was a year old and my first solo (traveling without an adult) when I was six years old. I learned to clear planes for landing and take off when I was about eight years old. Just think, one of your flights could have been cleared to land or take off by an eight year old with her father standing behind her. I can remember when I was about four, I was on a flight with my dad, and he tried to get me to put on a pair of those old earphones that they used to give passengers to plug into their seats for music. I started to cry because they scared me, how could music come out of my seat? My dad also owned a couple small aircrafts and would frequently take all of us kids up. While my sister was getting motion sickness, I would be plastered to the window, trying to find our house amid all the other minuscule buildings.

My dad was also an avid Radio Shack shopper. One Christmas, when I was ten, he came home with a two foot, tall programmable robot named Robie Sr. He had a tray to carry things, clamp hands for gripping things, a remote control to drive him and for programming, a timer so he could be set to perform certain tasks at certain times, head lights for guidance in the dark, an automated voice, a recordable voice, and intercom system so you could drive him into different rooms and call everyone to dinner.

I still have old Robie Sr. He sits silently in my living room collecting dust because I can't find his AC adapter to charge his battery. But what a dust collector he is.