My grandfather got into computers when they still ran on punch cards. He met my grandmother Rosemerry, known as Robin, in high school in New Rochelle, New York, and they lived in Miami while he studied computer science at the University of Miami, one of the first students from his school to do so. He graduated in June 1963, just weeks before my dad was born back in New Rochelle. From there he went to Honeywell, selling mainframe computers, with a short stop in Virginia along the way.
Then came the phone call. In the mid-1970s the family was vacationing at one of his business partners’ condos on Hilton Head Island when his job called: they wanted him in Chicago for the winter. He looked around at his family enjoying the beach and the adventure of an early Hilton Head, and that was that. Chicago lost. My dad and aunts grew up on an island with fewer than 5,000 people and no stoplights.
Getting there took some creativity. As the story goes, he traded Charles Fraser, the developer of Sea Pines, a mainframe computer and setup for a rental in Sea Pines. It may be the only time a mainframe has covered the rent.
Once he was on the island, he had a hand in real estate development, including Wildwood Spas in Sea Pines and Ashton Cove on the south end, and he started Coastal Marketing Services, a direct mail and MLS reporting agency that mostly served real estate agents. My dad took over the business in 2001.
And the man who traded a mainframe for a beach rental gave me my first computer, a Compaq. That’s where it started for me.