The Decision that Charted the Course for My Life

It all started in Northbrook, Illinois...

That’s a Polaroid photo of me around the age of fifteen

years old. Long, black hair, pimples and awkward, I was your typical upper middle-class white American male growing up in the seventies.

I was born on May 5, 1964. Every Cinqo de Mayo is a party celebrating my birthday, right? Raised in Northbrook, Illinois, I was fortunate to experience an upper-middle class upbringing in a good neighborhood by parents who loved me. If you want to get the vibe of my life as a teenager in Northbrook, I refer you to John Hughes’ classic films from the eighties. The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Home Alone and Weird Science were all based on Hughes’ experience in the Chicago suburbs. In particular, Glenbrook North High School, which is where I graduated from in 1982.

Up until 1978, my engagement with electronics included pinball machines and the earliest video gaming systems. I had a Fairchild Channel F system, which barely predated the now-legendary Atari 2600 gaming system. My best friend, Peter, and I would play video games on our televisions after school and on weekends.

My typical Chicago north shore childhood was punctuated by visits to the Brunswick bowling alley, The Edens Movie Theatre (where I saw Star Wars the week it premiered in 1977), The Chicago Museum of Science and Industry and Wrigley Field (before lights were installed).

Little did I know that when I turned fourteen, I would make a pivotal decision that would set the course for my life.

Northbrook Court is a high-end shopping mall that became a favorite hangout place for Peter and me. Of course, malls became synonymous with hangouts for all teenagers who lived through the eighties. As one would expect, the food court on the upper floor was the best to hang out.

At the ripe age of fourteen, I discovered that I could ask my school counselor for a work permit and apply for employment at the food court. My first job was at The Earl of Sandwich (not the same chain that exists today). I would be responsible for making pizzas and slinging sub sandwiches for hungry shoppers. For $2.65 per hour, I gladly entered the fast-food world.

I had become intimately acquainted with all the stores in the mall. Interestingly enough, one of the women’s clothing stores had a pinball machine in it, providing me with a reason to enter from time-to-time. I guess they wanted mothers with children a reason to shop there.

I enjoyed books as a teenager, so I frequented Waldens Books often. I spent a lot of time in the humor aisle. Raised on Monty Python, All in the Family, M.A.S.H. and comic books, I had broad access to a variety of humor and was always somewhat of a clown.

Once upon a time, I had a library of ethnic joke books which I treasured. Italian, Polish, Jewish, Irish and other joke books populated my shelf. It’s a shame that the humorless social justice warrior movement keeps stripping the funny from everything in the name of political correctness. As a Jewish person, I find just as much humor in Jewish jokes as I do in jokes centered around other ethnicities. Today, no one can make a joke about anything without being cancelled. Unless you are a leading comedian. People like Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr and Anthony Jezilnik can get away with saying whatever they want… thank God. Funny is funny.

My first keyboard instrument was purchased from the Lowrey Organ store when I was about 12-years old. To this day, I can’t read music. But I like to dabble on my current electric piano by playing chords and pretending I know what I’m doing.

I had always had a love for music. While in middle school, all the students were encouraged to pick an instrument. For some reason, I chose the Oboe. It did not go well. After months of practicing, the instructor told my parents that I “didn’t have the lips for it”. I just assumed he was correct and abandoned the instrument without regret.

It may have been my mother that then suggested I try the guitar. So we purchased an acoustic nylon string guitar and signed me up for lessons at The Village School of Music in Deerfield, Ill. Fortunately, my lips didn’t play a role with this instrument and I found it quite enjoyable. I still remember “Down by the Riverside” as the first song I was able to play. Pretty soon I graduated to John Denver tunes like “Leaving on a Jet Plane”.

My love for music didn’t stop with guitar, though. In 1973 I graduated from my childhood records to Chicago AM Radio. Larry Lujack, Superjock, a Chicagoland radio legend, became my favorite DJ to listen to. I would place my Radio Shack cassette player near the radio and record hours of music. Every week I eagerly sought out the latest 45s at TurnStyle store and purchased what I could for forty-nine cents per record. Eventually I graduated to albums. The first album I ever received was John Denver’s Greatest Hits, a Christmas gift from my parents.

As foreshadowing of things to come, I had aspirations to be a DJ even in my youth. I owned an all-in-one radio/cassette player that had an intercom connected by a 30-foot cable. By pushing a button on the unit, I could speak into the microphone and whoever was on the other end of the intercom could hear me.

I decided to play DJ for my family. From my bedroom on the second floor, I placed the intercom receiver as far as it would go down the stairs and into the entryway. To broadcast persistently, I jammed a quarter in the device to hold the intercom button down. I then pointed the speaker of my record player towards the microphone and became the mixmaster for my mom, dad and brother who likely didn’t recognize the genius of what I had done.

It wasn’t just the cassette player that came from Radio Shack. The store that was my father’s go-to for every kind of electric part and gadget was the store that would change my life. You see, in 1977 Tandy’s Radio Shack introduced the first personal computer into the marketplace.

The TRS-80 Model 1 computer was a nerd’s wet dream manifested. At the age of fourteen I’m certain my male hormones had kicked in and I enjoyed sneaking a look at my father’s hidden Playboy magazines. But truth be told, I spent more time in my sacred bathroom time ogling the pictures in the Radio Shack TRS-80 catalogue.

What a beauty it was, too!

Unlike the cumbersome punch card computers that I would encounter in my computer science class freshman year of high school, the TRS-80 Model 1 was elegant. A keyboard, a black-and-white monitor, and a radio shack cassette player. The unit came with a stunning 4K of RAM and the aforementioned cassette player. After all, you needed to have a way to save and load your programs.

I had to have one. I didn’t necessarily aspire to become a programmer. But I had to have this computer. This was my Red Ryder Air Rifle, only I didn’t have to be concerned about putting my eye out.

It was all the motivation I needed to make money at my pizza-slinging job. And save money, I did.

In 1979, I had saved enough to make the purchase that shaped my life.

I still recall my mother asking me, “what are you going to do with a computer?”.

The irony is all these years later not only does she understand what I would do with a computer, but she’s managed to pull off some incredible feats bringing her passion for travel to the online world. An enthusiastic globetrotter, my mom has been everywhere and has documented her travels on her blog at TravelsWithSheila.com. She’s uploaded more than 4000 videos to her YouTube channel and has received over 30 million views to date.

But in 1979 I probably just shrugged my shoulders and told her “I’m going to use it.”

And use it I did. Gravitating towards the games offered on the device, I remember seeing my dad giggle with delight at the “dancing demon”, a program that featured a cartoon, pixeled devil-like character lifting his arms and legs to a beep-boop song playing from my computer’s internal speaker.

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During my first year of computer ownership, I had an opportunity to write a program for one of my father’s associates. My dad was an architect and his friend Mort Block had a cabinet business. Mort wanted a database program to inventory his cabinets which would be installed in new homes during construction.

I had no idea how to program my computer, but I told Mort I could do the job.

Though I tried to learn how to code, it just wasn’t my area of skill. So I pulled a “Tom Sawyer” and got a friend to code it for me. To this day I’m grateful for Phil Goldberg as he did have the ability to write code. I learned not to do tasks that I am not equipped to do or that I am not passionate about. It’s one of the reasons I have succeeded as an entrepreneur.

Anyhow, with the money I earned for having Phil complete this task, I was able to purchase a 5 ¼” floppy disk drive and a coupler modem for my TRS-80. The modem required you to dial the number of a bulletin board system (BBSes as they were known) and place the phone on the modem receiver as it connected with the glorious high-pitched tones that indicated you were about to be online.

BBSes predate the commercial internet we all know by quite a few years. Computer enthusiasts would set up host software on their computers and make them available for others to dial into as I described above. Some were set up to allow two to four people simultaneous access. More advanced enthusiasts had up to sixteen connections at one time.

Once connected you would choose from menus that would allow access to message boards, online text-based games and downloads of software. Behold the online world of 1979. It was glorious. And I was there in the beginning. As of this writing (2023), I have been dialing into the online world for forty-four years. Beat that.

Shortly after acquiring my computer and playing the earliest Scott Adams’ text adventures, my high school acquired Apple II computers. I was thrilled to play with any computer and became a friend to my biology professor, Floyd, when he informed the class that we’d be using programs on the Apple II for learning. I guess I willingly became a teacher’s pet, and I didn’t care one bit. I was a nerd and proud of it.

Tribalism is something people experience when they can’t see the benefit of any way other than theirs. Whether it’s in musical tastes, politics or cola choices, people like to take sides. The computer world is not immune to this as there has always been a Mac vs PC mentality.

While the TRS-80 predates the PC, the z80 microprocessor and earliest forms of DOS (disk-operating systems) paved the way for IBM and Microsoft.

I enjoyed my personal computer AND I enjoyed using the Apple computers. There are benefits to both macs and PCs. I use my iOS devices for business and my PC for gaming and live streaming. This is the only set of circumstances in my life where I can say “I go both ways”. ;-)

(This piece is an excerpt from my biography which I have been casually writing over the last year. I may never release a book, but hopefully you are enjoying this.)