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When I was a little girl, I knew of the world outside our apartment door as translated by unassuming but cunning agents.
My mother, who made certain everyday homework was done, dinner was warm, and that all our clothes were clean and pressed also expertly managed, beside her household, a small cadre of employees and an office. My father, together with whom she ran the family business, rivaled her industriousness and drive. He rose earlier than the sun, shaving in quiet, raspy strokes, shining his shoes with dark, fragrant polish, and meticulously tying his necktie.
He would sip his coffee, black with a nip of sugar, at his desk, which was a small kitchen table tucked up against the sofa bed in the living room.
He’d turn on the computer, a grey-white IBM model which took up the length of the table. Its screen would first emit a teasing flicker, and then reveal a stark black screen filled with lines of text.
We’d hear the soft smack of his finger pads against the keys as he typed.
Click, click.
There’d be a pause as he toggled between one thought or the next, as he reconfigured a new line of code. And then, click, click.
I would watch at his elbow as my father typed endless lines of text, a modern hieroglyphics in green letters, working beside books on and in foreign languages like BASICS and COBOL. More thick tomes lined the low brown shelves beside the table.
And just after 12-14 hours of work at the office, as my mother slipped out of her dress or suit, and into the kitchen for dinner, he’d loosen his tie, hang it up in the closet, and sit back down at his desk. I would perch at the end of the sofa’s armrest to chat about the critical issues of the day: homework and recess.
He would listen.
And type.
Click, click.
He was a computer programmer who’d earned his degree just after arriving in New York City, a young man with little to no facility with English, let alone in computer code.
He’d moved into data processing in subterranean rooms of the large banks of the day, working in badly lit rooms downtown and deep underground by Rockefeller Center. They were filled with computers twice the size of refrigerators, and huge, spooling drums of paper, while he scanned and printed, and typed.
Click, click.
Years later, he now wrote code for programs to maintain the internal databases and accounting systems for the small business he and my mother ran, generating correspondence and keeping tabs on client’s birthdays and their insurance balances long before there was mail merging and QuickBooks.
In computer class at school, I would sit beside schoolmates as we worked on word games and typed out binary codes. They’d goof off and tease me for being a nerd.
I’d pretend to be my father, solving critical codes, puzzling a problem through to its conclusion.
I’d love to write “RUN” and hit Enter.
What happiness to find so neat a result in the tumult of the universe, to wrestle all the uncertainty and anxiety of the world into exactly correlating numbers and letters for a precise result. For “RUN” to mean success.
For a legion then of strivers, of thinkers, for whom “RUN” would not mean feats of athleticism, but would speak instead to mental gymnastics; for the so-called nerds, gamers, coders; for the programmers who burrowed deep into another language to make sense of a world that couldn’t – or wouldn’t – make sense of them; for the men and women whose quiet, quick strokes on the keyboard, early in the morning and late at night, on makeshift desks and in bad lighting, could make for a revolution.
For my father – and so many like him.
For Steve Jobs.
“RUN”.
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