Last week I spent three days chaperoning the Sierra Montessori Academy Field Trip.  This interval it was about Science and Technology, with tours of Stanford and the Stanford Linear Accelerator, programs at the San Jose Technology Museum and The San Jose Museum of Art, and stops at the Intel Museum and the Computer History Museum.  Belated posting of the resulting set of photos on Flickr (mostly restricted).

Spending time with the kids was really rewarding, especially the final stop at the Computer History Museum where I gave a short presentation tying together the early computers used by the defense department (linked by a network), up through the semiconductor revolution spurred by Intel, from the early microprocessors like the Rockwell AIM and the first Apple II, where I could show the kids some of the ancient hardware we learned on, relating all this up to the development of the Internet and the Web, playing up the SLAC-Cern connection and the contribution of Tim Berners-Lee.

I’ve known my work has always been abstract to my kids, since the day in 2nd grade my daughter came home with stories of the Dad who visited the class in his work uniform - the flight suit he wears when flying U2s over Yugoslavia or Afghanistan or who knows were. After she finished telling me all about it she said "and what do you do again, Daddy?”

But this time, by the end of my short presentation, Gen said "Gee Dad, you know a lot about this stuff."  You should have seen my smile!