I was born in 1983 and my father had a history of saying some dumb things. Some of it was fairly harmless, but kind of stupid, like his belief that the Super Bowl should be a best of three series. Other things were a bit on the racist side that I would like to not repeat.

My old man was into computers and I would tell him that I would love to get a new computer with a CD ROM drive (not sure what computer we had but it was something with EGA graphics running DOS). I remember once he got annoyed by me, telling me that CD-ROM drives, in 1995, were a waste of time.

In the fall of 96, we got a new Packard Bell computer with a CD ROM drive. One day I noticed him playing links 386 and being a smart ass 13-year-old, sarcastically said “Oh, I thought cd ROM drives were useless!”

He replies, “I meant putting them on older computers would be useless.” He never said that when making his original statement, but that’s beside the point nowadays.

All these years later, I’d like to ask this community, did he have any clue what he was talking about? Did he somehow forsee our digital future and know that CD-ROM drives would be useless? Would it have been a waste of time to put them on something made in the late 80s and early 90s?

Help me and my 13-year-old self make sense of this man.