My father was a very funny man. He was also brilliant, and that can be a dangerous combination.

He helped to write FORTRAN and COBOL (I use all caps, although most do not anymore), which are computer languages. Though we lived in the Midwest, he was in Palo Alto a lot and he told us that they were calling it "The Valley" and eventually it would be known as "Silicon Valley." He hated it. He hated computers, he said they were soulless and that if you spent too much time on one, you started thinking like a computer. (This never happened to him, that I could see.)

I know who paid his life insurance when my father died, but I do not think he worked for that company. I think he was actually working for another large company with three letters, a company very instrumental in Business Machines, if you get my drift.

My father got cancer and died at the age of fifty-seven so there ya go.

The early computers were as big as refrigerators and very noisy. My father took my brother and I to his office a couple of times (it was a locked facility) and I will never forget this huge underground room filled with massive machines. They had reels on the top and they hummed so loudly that I could feel them in my feet.

I remember saying, "Dad? They aren't moving." And he said, "Princess, they're going so fast that they appear to be standing still, but those reels are full of information and the computer is reading it now."

This was my first exposure to something that I would never fully understand.

My father had programmed the first computer game. It was "War", a simple card game where both players put down one card and whoever has the higher card takes both cards. The winner is the one eventually holding fifty-two cards. It can go fast or slow, depending upon how the cards fall.

This was News. So Dad took my brother and me to his office and booted up some computers. They scared the crap out of me, because they were blue screens and I of course felt they were televisions. (Kids today will not know there was a time when we did not have computers in our homes and that the very notion of one was like science fiction.)

Brian and I sat in chairs waiting. We were going to see "War" played on a computer! With no cards!

Dad said, "Ready?" and we nodded and he pushed a few keys and suddenly the words appeared on the monitor screen: "The computer won."

I said, "But where was the game?" and Dad said, "Sweetheart, the computer played the game so fast that you couldn't see it."

I burst into tears and my brother said angrily, "Why do you fuck with us this way?"

(I will never forget that comment of Brian's. It still makes me laugh.)

Dad said, "I'm not trying to upset either of you. But I wanted you to understand something and I don't know how to explain it."

Brian said, "I knew this would be bullshit."

Dad said, "Brian, look at your thumbnail." Brian did.

Dad said, "You see the size of your thumbnail?" and Brian said, "Yeah" and my father said, "One day not far from now, every single thing in this room will be on what's called a microchip. And that microchip will be the size of your thumbnail."

My brother said, "They pay you for this?" and Dad laughed and said, "No, I get paid to tell the computers what to do. The game you just saw was to show some people in Palo Alto what we have coming. And even I can't imagine what's beyond that. Probably games that look like cartoons and you'll be able to play them with a hand controller."

We were clueless. We were more into running around outside and climbing trees and riding bikes.

I could not conceive of all that information being on a chip the size of someone's fingernail. Because right then, it took three huge rooms to hold it all.

Dad leaned forward and clasped his hands between his knees.

"See, there's this thought," he said, "that one day? Every home will have this screen in it, and a computer as well. The screen is not a computer, it's what we call a monitor. And the part that drives a computer will be so small that it will fit in peoples' homes. It's called a 'hard drive' and they're working on that now in Palo Alto."

That's when I started to laugh. It was ludicrous.

"It is kind of funny, isn't it?" my father said. "But imagine this: imagine a record smaller than one of your 45's, okay?" and I tried. Dad said, "One day very soon, a whole set of encyclopedias will be on a record like that, and we call that record a disc. And people will put that disc into a computer and the computer will show everything from A to Z that was in those encyclopedias. Pictures, too. And there might be tests on the disc, or ways to ask questions."

"What will we do with the encyclopedias we already have?" I asked practically.

"They'll be outdated," Dad said. "One day, people will be able to have their computer-encyclopedia updated every day if necessary because it will be part of a huge network of computers all over the world."

"All I can say," Brian said, "is that Mom will shit if you bring something like that home."

My dad laughed and I said, "Is this what you've been doing in Palo Alto all this time?" and my father said, "This and more. Far more. We had to learn how to talk to computers with a binary system first, and then we started the rest. Computers are only as smart as the person who makes the software, and not one computer, anywhere, is smarter than the human brain."

We left and Dad told us just to keep quiet about it for now. Brian swore that the computer had not played cards at all; I did not know what to think.

I am sitting in my father's future now, with a computer in front of me and we have two others in the house. I know people who have computers but no television. What Dad said came true.

My father never used the word "web" because he died before that was common. He did not say "internet" because that's fairly new word as well, but he did say "network."

I remember hearing him say to my mother one time, "It's the end of the world as we know it."

"It'll work out, Danny," she said. "Doesn't it always?"

"This will go and go," my father said. "There is no finish to it. What we are doing will never be done, it will never end until the world does."

My mother paused and stared at Dad. Something dawned on her then, I'm not sure what it was. She, who would not have a microwave oven or, later, a VCR, was trying to understand what even my father did not have the words to say.

Computers are soulless. They are a wealth of information but also a source of endless pain in so many ways. People actually become addicted to this medium of information exchange. People actually get divorced because of what they have typed on a computer, either to another person or another computer, however you want to look at it.

In the first few months after he programmed computers to play a card game, my father saw one of the few black-and-white truths he ever knew. And he was frightened by what he saw. He hated being part of the human machine that made the virtual machine happen.

Every time my father had to take the red-eye to Palo Alto, I saw Silicon Valley as a huge gaping hole in the earth that was taking other kids' fathers and mothers to make them teach computers to read encyclopedias.

I will always see it that way. As grateful as I am to have this means of expression and communication, I look at my own thumbnail in awe, knowing that chips smaller than that literally make the world go 'round.

If that doesn't make you catch your breath, give it some thought.

And then go outside and feel the real air, see the real sky, touch the real trees. They're still there.

But the world as we knew it ended a long time ago.