It's late, but we had a call for me to talk about my father.

Two moments:
Many years ago before YouTube, or any of the internet's repositories, my father went looking for a tape. A very specific tape. See It Now, March 19, 1954. So he consulted catalogs, checked archives, and finally ended up calling up CBS Television, and got them to give him an copy of their archive footage. And he showed that to me on one night when I was back from college, and I guess it's been an influence ever since. For my dad it was formative as he watched it live, and watched his father broken from being spellbound. This showed him how the powerful can be taken down, armed with facts and logic and without hate or lies. For me, it's always been the sanitizing power of sunshine, give people have enough information, they get an accurate picture, and they make the right decisions.

This past Sunday, we got to sit and talk about my work. He's always had a passing interest in my work with NAQT because of the similarities between the quizbowl situation, and the minicomputer industry back in the early '80s. In '83 he was selling minicomputers and memory boards (10 grand a Megabyte!) to industrial plants, for a company that held 80% of that market. But that company had made a lot of mistakes, they had alienated a lot of their customers and employees, and they believed themselves invincible. So my dad got together with a few other people, and put together a technological improvement to their model, and he started a company. Over three years they took a prototype to production, and it ended up in utility plants, factories, and (in his proudest moment) JPL, where it processed the signal from the Voyager probes (even at this distance, they're still sending signal through). He spent a week in the crawl spaces of JPL pulling cable to connect it all up. And after three years where his opposition was arrogant enough to put its clients up for the taking, then worried enough to lie and spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about him and his products, then paranoid enough to bury their statements, and incompetent enough to let their 80% market dominance become his company's 80% market dominance, he sold his company back to them, and watched as the increase in processor speed obliterated the market for minicomputers.

So he's always seen the similarities between NAQT and his situation back then, and now that we find ourselves at the end of the road for one of our competitors, he could see the similarities. He sat there on Father's Day and having heard of all the changes and who was gunning for us and how they had burned their own reputations while trying to burn ours, and who we could still help, he just smiled, which is rare enough for him, and he said, “I think you should keep at it.” And he 's right, the situation may have changed, but if we're going to hook this up truly for everyone, there's still some cables to pull.

At the end of the day, we end up being our father's sons. And I am not descended from fearful men.