This Father's Day was certainly a quiet one in the Mac Universe, so we thought you might not mind some self-indulgent reflection on just what the Mac means to my own father. See, if the world is divided into the technically-savvy and the technophobes, Dear Old Dad falls squarely into the latter category. He's the kind of guy who owns a VCR to play movies, but almost resents the fact that such an oscenely complex piece of electronic equipment resides in his house. You know the type: the clock on the VCR flashes "12:00 AM" forever, because the owner doesn't know how to set the time-- and doesn't want to learn.

So that's the type of person my father is, and he's been that way for just about as long as I can remember. While his son was joyfully pulling apart the guts of his trusty Apple //e, Dad was nervous around anything more advanced than an electric typewriter (though that became a necessary tool in his role as political science professor, so he made the adjustment). Unsurprisingly, then, Dad was adamant on his "I don't need a computer" stance. To a certain extent, he was right; everything he needed to do, he was able to accomplish with a typewriter, the U.S. Postal Service, the telephone, and good old-fashioned elbow grease. I always knew that his life could be made easier if he could bring himself to use a computer, but he was definitely getting along alright without one. After all, people have struggled along for thousands of years without spellcheckers, right?

The time I was pretty sure that my father would never use a computer came when I went away to college. For four years, I had unlimited access to email and IRC on the school's Unix-based systems, which would have allowed us to communicate for free, if he could just bring himself to get a free faculty account at his own university and learn the basics. I told him this many times, and even demonstrated how I was able to real-time chat with people at his own school a thousand miles away when he came to visit me. He was suitably impressed and amazed, but rather than learn to use a computer, he chose to pay the obscenely high phone bills incurred by my three to five weekly collect calls back home.

Then came the turning point-- my father's university switched to an entirely online registration system. Since my dad was the faculty advisor for the entire political science department, he had no choice but to accept the computer they gave him and learn how to use it. Thank heavens they gave him a Mac. He gritted his teeth and dug in his heels, and learned how to access and edit his students' schedules. And that's when he found out that using a computer isn't that bad. Point to things you want to use, and click. Drag stuff you don't need to the trash. Write articles just like on a typewriter, but use the delete key instead of liquid paper. All pretty easy.

Then he discovered email. The university hooked him up with an account to receive faculty announcements and the like, but it didn't take him long to start realizing he could contact people all over the world without paying for stamps or having to wait days for delivery. Soon he started emailing me with all kinds of questions: Could students email term papers to him? Could he maintain discussion lists for the veterans group he volunteers for? The possibilities kept growing. Exposure to the web came soon after, and UseNet after that-- and with a limitless, fast, free, and boundless source of information at his disposal, well, that's pretty much any academic's dream. Even the technophobic ones.

More questions arose-- there are a bunch of Chinese news sites and newsgroups; how could he make them show up in Chinese, instead of as gibberish? (Merry Christmas, Dad-- install this Chinese Language Kit.) Old friends in Hong Kong are emailing him photos of themselves; how could he view them? (I emailed him JPEGView, and that was that.) Now he's receiving articles for editing from people all over the world, for inclusion in the newspaper for his veteran's group. It's really quite astounding just how far he's taken all this-- especially since he still doesn't really know what he's doing. That's okay-- it's a Mac, so he's doing it anyway.

Then came the eye operations, to relieve a glaucoma-like condition he picked up in Vietnam. While healing, he could hardly see his hand in front of his face. He called me and told me he felt cut off from his Mac, where hundreds of email messages surely awaited him. Not a problem-- I talked his secretary through installing Apple's CloseView control panel, and suddenly the letters on his screen were white on black and three inches high. Suddenly he was productive again, though legally blind, with no third-party software needed to get him back on track. It is a Mac, after all.

He's still learning. Last Christmas, when we were back at my grandmother's house, he hauled out the old typewriter to write a proposal that he needed to drop off at an office in town the next day. "Here, Dad, I've finished AtAT for the day-- use my Duo." But where could he print it out when he was finished writing it? "We could always hit Kinko's on the way. Or, did they give you a fax number?" They had. And he was both amazed and gratified that we could fax his proposal in to the office directly from my Duo, just by plugging in a phone line. Not only that, but we were able to email the file to his account at school, so it would be sitting in his inbox when he returned, ready for him to file away in whatever virtual folder he deemed fit.

Anyway, that's pretty much the whole story. My dad is still emailing me questions today, as he continues to learn more and more about the potential uses of his Mac. I can honestly say, if the university had given him a Windows 3.1 system instead of a Mac, I don't think my father would have kept that job. He definitely wouldn't be using his computer to read Chinese news sites on the web, maintain email lists of veterans groups, or keep in touch with old friends in Japan. To this day, his only exposure to non-Mac systems is watching his secretary get agitated over Windows exploding. The Mac gave him high technology with a friendly face, and he embraced it. It's funny; you can hardly pull him off that Power Mac these days, and even though he still hasn't a clue about how computers work, he's using that system every day to work and play.

And you can tell that some of that old technophobe attitude is wearing off. Heck, I think his VCR's even showing the right time these days.