Lessons from Papa - Lesson 4

This post is part of a series memorializing my dad, Rolando Vergel de Dios, who passed away unexpectedly on November 29th, 2024. For the full context it’s best to start at the beginning: Lesson 1.

Yesterday was 1 year since Papa died. I have been slacking on writing up these lessons but I wanted to pick it up again since I’ve been thinking about him a lot more than usual.

When I was growing up one of my favorite things to do was to visit my cousins’ houses. Was it because I enjoyed the adventures we would go on together? Because of their companionship? Because of the camaraderie of being amongst my closest family? No, it’s because they all had game consoles at their houses and I wasn’t allowed to have any. Papa made the conscious (and contentious, to me) decision that my brother and I were not going to have those distraction machines in our house.

It was also contentious decision in his mind (as I found out later when I asked him about it) because he was worried that he might be depriving us of something that a lot of the other kids around us had. I was allowed to play whenever I was at a friend’s or cousin’s house but I would never have one in our house.

As it turns out, this was a much better idea than he thought even if he wasn’t sure of it at at the time. Instead of an NES, SNES, N64, or PlayStation, in 1993 he bought us our very first PC. It had a then screaming 1st-generation 60 MHz Pentium processor, 8MB of RAM, and, crucially, a 9600-baud modem. We had Windows 3.1 installed, but still had the computer boot by default into a DOS prompt and you would have to run the win command to get into Windows. This, unbeknownst to me at that time, would prove to be a defining decision of my life.

When I protested and insisted that I wanted a gaming console he told me to learn how to use the PC and try to make my own fun out of it. And boy, did I. I spent a huge chunk of my time playing classics like Wing Commander, F-15 Strike Eagle, Sim City, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Commander Keen, and basically any other shareware I could get my hands on. Despite Papa’s best efforts I was still rotting my brain playing video games. But, there were many more learning opportunities than there would have been with any gaming console. PC gaming was how I was introduced to the wonderful world of troubleshooting. Games wouldn’t alway run as expected and at the tender age of 6 I was already poking around to try to tweak things to get them to run more smoothly. And Papa was right there with me in the struggle.

One time in my haste trying to create more space on our 200MB hard drive I deleted the config.sys file. Those who know can predict what happened next. The next time I tried to boot I was greeted with a cryptic error message and I was stumped. Papa, being ever resourceful, enlisted the help of a long-haired metalhead who worked at CompUSA who was a regular customer at the restaurant. He generously spent an afternoon guiding me through the recovery and got me up and running again.

Finally, we made good use of that 9600-baud modem. In 1993 we were definitely early adopters of the internet. By my estimation we were among the first 10M people surfing the web. We of course got our start with AOL using their infamous “free trial” floppies that we received (and still have) dozens of. I spent hours playing Neverwinter Nights, trolling anyone who would listen to me in chat rooms, and eventually goofing off with friends on AIM once it was launched.

This fun hobby would continue for my entire childhood into adulthood as Papa and I would build several computers together. We would scour local PC magazines for sales, drive way too far to dingy little computer parts stores in far-flung strip malls, make countless trips to Fry’s, spend late nights and endless hours tweaking and troubleshooting when things would go wrong.

All of this would also eventually lead to me learning how to build websites (RIP Geocities) and how to program. So I guess I have to thank Papa’s deprivation for my career.

The lesson I took from Papa in all of this is to stay curious and don’t follow the crowd. You’ll find value where everyone else isn’t looking.