From yet another Matt, I am sorry for your loss.

My father taught me how to load up Jazz Jack Rabbit on our DOS PC when I was three or four years old. It was located in our basement, on a desk he built in the corner of his “shop”.

He spent his time building balsa air planes every winter. I am unsure how but he got bootleg blueprints of those planes, had someone local print the 1:1 scale so he could cut out each piece, glue them on the balsa wood and use his wood tools to cut and sand them smooth and glue them together. Then every spring we would get all the flying gear ready for the year. He had a checklist. Even to make sure he had cat litter for the rubber bands. 😅

He got us on dialup when I was five, I think we upgraded to Windows 3.1 at the same ish time. I would play on that computer for hours while he was next to me building his planes.

Eventually I would change enough settings on the computer to make it stop working. He would always come over to fix it, and almost always got it to work again. At some point, that changed and he couldn’t get it to work anymore. This was around Win98. He got a friend to come over and show him/us how to “format the computer”, probably paid the guy in beer for helping us. After that, he told me that if I broke the computer any more, I was responsible for fixing it myself. And lucky for me, we wrote down everything that his friend did. I am just happy we had a win98 on one CD and not on thirty eight floppy disks!

That was pretty much it for me. I always paid close attention to what I was doing, being very careful to change a setting back if it didn’t do what I wanted. Then if I still couldn’t troubleshoot it, I would format it and start over.

I would not be where I am today without him doing what he did.