Memorial

The reason I'm here in Boston is to attend a memorial service for Lew - a friend of my Dad's since Birmingham University in the heady days of the 1950s. Lew moved across the Atlantic with his high-energy particle research physicist wife Margaret, and became Director of Computer Services at Harvard University - the first person in the whole world (as far as I was concerned) who owned a computer.

I was five when we first visited him and Margaret in 1981, when Lew already had e-mail at home via his terminal that phoned straight into the Harvard mainframe. I played the incredibly awesome robots game on it. Each time we visited he had a new machine, including the Apple Macintosh 128k, the most wonderful thing I'd ever seen.

Lew passed away in February. The memorial service was really nice, with several people recounting their memories of the room-filling university computers of the 1970s (with 32k of memory made of magnetic rings hand-woven with copper wire). It was obvious how he exuded a love of computers and electronics in a way that affected everyone around him, including young and impressionable me.

At the reception afterwards, as I wandered amongst computing professors and particle physicists (many with beards), I spotted the familiar face of my father:

A long time ago, in a Birmingham far, far away... (Lew far left, Dad second from right. Nice hair.)