The Tinker Gene
Wednesday, January 02, 2008 Filed in: People
Genes being what they are, it may be that we inherit
more from our parents than we realize. among others,
I inherited the tinker gene from my father.
Childhood for me and my brothers was somewhat normal, lower middle class, small town, church on Sunday. There wasn't much extra money, but we had clothes, toys, bikes, a car, a washer and dryer, and air conditioning.
Dad may have inherited the tinker gene from his father. Regardless, my father was a tinkerer. When things broke, he fixed them, and it didn't matter what they were, or whether he knew what he was doing. He tinkered around until it was fixed.
He fixed the refrigerator when it broke. He fixed a broken transmission in the car. His rule of thumb was take it apart slowly, remember where all the pieces went, find something that looks broken, put it back together again, and hope there were no extra parts.
Those are pretty much the rules I use today when I tinker, which is often. There is one difference. Dad's generation tinkered with household appliances, cars, lawn mowers, electrical wiring, furnaces, and so on.
I tinker with computers.
Like my father, I'm mostly self taught, having become involved with using a computer back in the very early 1980s. I bought an Osborne 1 which ran CP/M, SuperCalc, WordStar, and dBase II on 64k of memory, dual floppy drives, and a 9-inch black and white screen.
Since then I've tinkered with a little of everything in computerdom. PCs of every flavor. MS-DOS, Unix variants, Linux, and, of course, Apple's Macintosh. I tinker with software; applications and utilities, PHP scripts, and databases, content management systems, and the internet.
Dad is far better at figuring out what is wrong with a car or furnace or a boat engine or a washer and dryer. But I know who to call when they break. When one of my computers goes on the fritz I may not know exactly what to do right away, but there's the age old process of elimination which is a good start.
Things are tough to fix if you don't know what's broken.
These days I run a couple of computer servers at home, and manage half a dozen more elsewhere. Not only do I handle the computer system administrator functions, I create and manage plenty of content for various web sites.
It all started with the tinker gene.
Childhood for me and my brothers was somewhat normal, lower middle class, small town, church on Sunday. There wasn't much extra money, but we had clothes, toys, bikes, a car, a washer and dryer, and air conditioning.
Dad may have inherited the tinker gene from his father. Regardless, my father was a tinkerer. When things broke, he fixed them, and it didn't matter what they were, or whether he knew what he was doing. He tinkered around until it was fixed.
He fixed the refrigerator when it broke. He fixed a broken transmission in the car. His rule of thumb was take it apart slowly, remember where all the pieces went, find something that looks broken, put it back together again, and hope there were no extra parts.
Those are pretty much the rules I use today when I tinker, which is often. There is one difference. Dad's generation tinkered with household appliances, cars, lawn mowers, electrical wiring, furnaces, and so on.
I tinker with computers.
Like my father, I'm mostly self taught, having become involved with using a computer back in the very early 1980s. I bought an Osborne 1 which ran CP/M, SuperCalc, WordStar, and dBase II on 64k of memory, dual floppy drives, and a 9-inch black and white screen.
Since then I've tinkered with a little of everything in computerdom. PCs of every flavor. MS-DOS, Unix variants, Linux, and, of course, Apple's Macintosh. I tinker with software; applications and utilities, PHP scripts, and databases, content management systems, and the internet.
Dad is far better at figuring out what is wrong with a car or furnace or a boat engine or a washer and dryer. But I know who to call when they break. When one of my computers goes on the fritz I may not know exactly what to do right away, but there's the age old process of elimination which is a good start.
Things are tough to fix if you don't know what's broken.
These days I run a couple of computer servers at home, and manage half a dozen more elsewhere. Not only do I handle the computer system administrator functions, I create and manage plenty of content for various web sites.
It all started with the tinker gene.
