This week Kinga and I finished getting DSL installed for my her dad’s computer, as well as a general overhaul of the whole thing — re-installing Windows (that basic computer admin hell known only to Microsoft victims), cleaning out old files, etc.

And teaching him how to use a webcam. Actually, much to his credit, he figured that out for himself. We’d shown him how to use Skype: for voice chatting, but it doesn’t include video chatting at the moment. For that, I reluctantly installed MS Messenger, and he figured out the rest while Kinga and I were at home Saturday morning.

He does catch on fairly quickly, I must admit — once you show him something, he remembers it.

But like many people new to computers, he’s not comfortable learning as I did: clicking around, thinking, “Hum, wonder what this does.”

It has, once again, shown me how relatively “ahead of his times” my father is. Our first computer was a TRS-80, with, I think, a staggering 8kb of memory. Those were the days — plugging your computer into the television as a monitor, and connecting it to a cassette recorder in order to load a program.

Next we had an IBM PC Jr. It was a waste of time, I think, and Dad quickly upgraded to “the last computer we’ll ever need.” It had a mind-blowing 40 MB hard drive.

Jan, Kinga’s father, didn’t touch a computer until Kinga bought one for university. But in his typical, admirable fashion, he bought books and magazines and read up on the world of computers, even if he didn’t understand it all.

Now that he’s got DSL, he doesn’t feel guilty sitting for hours at the computer, just wandering around the internet.