“This is the future”: my father, a bricklaying machine and a C64

As a little boy I wanted to be a bricklayer. It was the obvious choice: I often went along with my father to his building sites, and what could be better than a wall that grows a little higher every day?

A man who taught himself everything

My father was born in April 1940, in the middle of the Second World War. His father was an electrician. He came back from captivity as a prisoner of war and died early. Perhaps that is where my father’s soft spot for electrics and electronics came from.

He trained as something quite different: a car mechanic. He never went to university. Everything else he taught himself. Boat building, for example: he designed ocean-going yachts and built two of them himself, in a hall of his own, to his own plans.

And he built a construction company from nothing, until it had around a hundred employees.

The machine

Then came the day I no longer wanted to be a bricklayer. I was eleven or twelve.

My father proudly showed something that did not yet exist in Germany, perhaps not in all of Europe: a fully automatic, electronically controlled bricklaying machine. He had filed a patent for it, and a delegation from Japan later bought the patent from him, for prefabricated construction.

My mother was there. She later told me what I said to my father that day:

“I don’t want to be a bricklayer any more. I want to do something with computers.”

I do not remember saying it myself. But I remember the feeling: that a machine can do things if you only give it the right instructions.

The breadbin

At eleven I got my Commodore 64. Whether it was for Christmas or my birthday I no longer know; the two are only four weeks apart for me. My mother was against it. Too expensive.

“What will you give him for his eighteenth, then?” she is said to have asked. “A brand-new BMW?”

My father replied:

“No. This is the future. And the boy should work with it, if he enjoys it.”

I enjoyed it.

What remains

My father died when I was thirteen. He did not live to see what became of the computer he gave me against all resistance. BASIC became assembler, assembler became C, little games on the schoolyard became software for the stock market. And today I talk to machines that talk back.

He was right. It was the future.

Sometimes I think he would have liked this website. He was a man who built things himself because he wanted to know how they work. I think I got that from him.