What My Father Taught Me: Cory Doctorow

May 28, 2013 3:38 PM Text Size: A . A . A My father learned how to read English from comic books and pulp sci-fi novels. He would tell me stories that were thinly adapted Conan tales. He also exposed me to a lot of technologically utopian thinking.

My grandparents were Eastern European Jews living in Toronto, so it was mandatory they spend their winters in Florida, and we'd go down to seem them. Of course we went to Disney World a lot, and when we were there we'd talk about the robots. My grandfather would always say, "Think of the magic behind it all." And my dad would say, "Think of the computers running these robots." There was this sense of come the revolution, comrade, we all will have a Disney World.

My dad was really good at making me think everything through. The scientific method is a totally counterintuitive thing because it begins by saying: You can't trust your memory or your senses. You have to measure things empirically and write them down because otherwise everything you remember and everything you know is colored by your biases and experiences and hopes and aspirations. And essentially your brain lies to you all the time. This is a very hard thing to get a 5-year-old to understand.

One thing my dad was quite good about was giving me enough rope to hang myself and leaving me alone in front of a computer. When we got an Apple II Plus in 1979 there was virtually no software on it. Basically, we got two floppy disks' worth of demos, none of them super exciting. I remember there was a simulator for running a lemonade stand and a Mad Libs program. But there were magazines like Byte that had thousands of lines of BASIC, which you could type into a computer and use it to make programs?that is, if you could type thousands of lines without making a typo (not easy for a 9-year-old.) He provided me with the technology and handed me an issue of Byte and he turned me loose.

As told to Jennings Brown

Previously: What My Father Taught Me: NASA Chief Technologist Mason Peck

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/what-my-father-taught-me-cory-doctorow-15526233?src=rss

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