Address elided by Jed<\/span><\/p>\r\nPalo Alto, CA 94306<\/p>\r\n
5 February 1983<\/p>\r\n
Dear Parents,<\/p>\r\n
Well, you\u2019ve known for a long time that writing letters, even socially obligatory letters, is not my long shirt... I\u2019m sorry, but we can\u2019t all be perfect.... Anyway, here is a letter, in fact three of them.... Jed and I put together this program on the ADAM which will enable us to write letters easily and print them on the ADAM printer.... So now I don\u2019t have any excuse not to write you....<\/p>\r\n
Well, I have been extremely busy at work, often working ten-hour days.... Yesterday I took a day off, because Jed wasn\u2019t feeling well, and that was a good excuse to stay home... so I used eight hours vacation time. He had had a slight headache for several days, and I took him to our co-op clinic.<\/p>\r\n
Ordinarily, we would not have been concerned, but about four days ago, the 17-year-old son of Jed\u2019s computer teacher died of meningitis, only 12 hours after exhibiting the symptoms: a severe headache, nausea, a sore throat, and a stiff neck. Jed had contact with some of the boy\u2019s friends in some of his classes, so we wanted to be sure he was OK. (He is.) The strange thing is, ten percent of the population carry these bacteria in their throats: I think nobody understands how they get into the meninges.<\/p>\r\n
Aside from that, we are all well, and all very busy at home, and at school, and at work. Susan and I are enjoying going to jazz concerts a few times a month. Last night we went to an auction benefitting Joaquin \u0301s school (Wilbur). It was most enjoyable: I was top bidder on an old Chinese landscape scroll, I believe worth several hundred dollars, and paid $35 for it. Susan was top bidder on a \"grasshopper pie\"... no, it\u2019s not the insect, but rather refers to the creme-de-menthe drink...<\/p>\r\n
Well, your Christmas present was certainly a B I G H I T! We all pigged out on doughnuts, granola bars, and lefse for a week, and loved it, and loved you for making and for sending them...<\/p>\r\n
Tomorrow there will be another ad in the Sunday Mercury-News (San Jose) for John\u2019s ADAM... It\u2019s for sale in the computer column, for $4250.... maybe someone will respond this time.... I\u2019m paying for these ads from my pocket, since John is broke. I wish I could help him more, but I don\u2019t have a whole lot of money myself after all our expenses: rent, utilities & phone, food, clothes, insurance, car payments, loan payments, payments on this ADAM, and so on... About ten sentences redacted by Jed.<\/span> I also believe that if any of your friends or Vicky or any of her or of John's friends wanted to learn programming, the ADAM is a superb machine to learn it on.... I further believe that it is a money-making machine, if only the people around it can come up with imaginative ideas of how best to utilize it. One such way, which has not been tried, is to demonstrate the machine to potential buyers, and earn a commission on the sale of a Logical Machine to a businessperson who could use it to do all the accounting jobs for a small- to medium-sized company....<\/p>\r\nWell, anyway, I hope and pray that it will work out for the best.... I am sure we have all learned something from this experience.... I have learned not to sell a computer to someone unless I am in a position to buy it back, in case they\u2019re not satisfied... What have you learned?<\/p>\r\n
Work is going fine; I guess I told you about the bonus I got, bringing my salary to $42K+, and about the 5000 shares of Logical stock I was granted. Now, if I work very hard, this stock will be worth something.... if not, it will be good only for wallpaper....<\/p>\r\n
So I am glad you recovered from the pneumonia you contracted at Paul\u2019s. Maybe I can use this program to send them a letter too, to thank them for their thoughtful Christmas gifts. Thanks for the picture: I am enclosing the letter from Jason -- pretty nice!<\/p>\r\n
Well, I guess I\u2019ll print this and set it in the mail -- hope you both are feeling well... hope you can come here for the wedding, whenever we set a date and get our scene together....<\/p>\r\n
Love and Light,<\/p>\r\n
Peter<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n
Notes<\/h2>\r\n\r\n - \u201cJed\u2019s computer teacher\u201d<\/dt>\r\n
- She wasn\u2019t exactly my computer teacher; rather, she ran the computer lab at Paly. She was great. I think a couple years later, she got married and moved to another state, and I lost contact with her. When I drive by where she used to live, I occasionally wonder how her life went after that. \u2026I imagine that her son\u2019s death must have been totally devastating for her, but I didn\u2019t know him, and at the time I didn\u2019t know her well enough to talk with her about how she was doing.<\/dd>\r\n
- \u201c$4250\u201d<\/dt>\r\n
- They were trying to sell Dobe\u2019s ADAM for the equivalent of about $12,500 in today\u2019s money. Granted computers were more expensive back then, but even so, that seems like an awful lot to pay for a home computer. (And I\u2019m guessing that Dobe had paid even more than that to buy it.)<\/dd>\r\n
- The ADAM had been released in 1976 (one page says 1974), so it was about seven to nine years old by this time, and Logical had released about three later models\/generations of computers since then. I don\u2019t know what ended up happening to Peter\u2019s or Dobe\u2019s ADAMs, but I suspect they ended up selling them for much much less money than they were hoping for.<\/dd>\r\n
- \u201c$42K+\u201d<\/dt>\r\n
- So Peter was making the equivalent of about $123,000 a year in today\u2019s money, including his bonus. \u2026Sadly, as far as I know, the stock was never worth anything. I think the company probably went out of business within a couple years.<\/dd>\r\n<\/dl>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Peter writes about work, and a sad death in the community, and a computer that Uncle Dobe had bought. \u201cNow, if I work very hard, this stock will be worth something…. if not, it will be good only for wallpaper….\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-peter","category-palo-alto"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2556"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2607,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2556\/revisions\/2607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}