Retiring a Legend

Today my Dad retired. Not as Steve Jobs or Bill Gates but as Bob Rice. He sat outside the the IBM store in Beverly Hills in November 1981 waiting to by his first PC. He got it home and took it apart to see how it worked, then put it back together again. He started teaching himself programming and then started a company called Micro Personal Consulting. He taught people how to use their PC’s for their own personal and professional use. In 1982 when PC Magazine started they thought what he was doing was so important they asked him to write a column for them and it lasted all of 9 issues. He got into programming working as an air traffic controller, he learned how to program the radar screens, but he was personally fired by Ronald Regan in 1979 when all the air traffic controllers went on strike. He went on to work for a millionaire who started a discount brokerage firm called Pacific Brokerage Services out of Los Angeles and he wrote the code that transferred all the trades to the New York stock exchange on a daily basis. In 1996 his boss said to him if you can write a program that allows people to buy and sell stocks online I’ll give you a $1 a trade (total fee at the time was $7), 6 months later his code went live and they made over 10,000 trades in one day and my Dads boss said obviously I was kidding but here’s a bonus check for 100k, my Dad humbly said ok. In 2002 The firm was bought out and he left to start looking into a system called VOIP he thought it was the future of telephones. He leaned everything he could about it and started his own company called Empower Voip, he was so passionate about programming that he started giving code to the company he was leasing the telephones from to improve their systems. Needless to say he didn’t do really well at sales, and really liked doing all the work himself, due to not charging enough for his services, he had to sell his clients to the nearest competitor, turns out he was right it was a big thing. All this time, since 1994 he was volunteering for Guide Dogs of America setting up their computer systems and their telephones on the weekends. So when he sold his company for basically nothing, he had nothing left and they hired him because he was always there for them.

Here is a screen shot from issue 8 of PC Magazine where he’s listed Rice, Bob IBM Updates DOS to 1.10 - How cool is that. My Dad, so proud. To give you an example of his character in 1992 I was visiting his work and a co worker of my Dad’s keep telling I hope one day you get to know how great your Dad really is... I didn’t know what he was talking about until one day one of his work buddies told me he gave his that guy 8k to help out with his heart surgery because he was born with an upside down heart and couldn’t afford it. The guy passed away 12 years later but that’s 12 more years with his family that my Dad thought was important. - I asked him about it a few years back when he was unemployed and he said, “It’s just money, and sometimes someone needs it more than you.” - My Dad, he’s done amazing things and he didn’t feel like becoming famous or a millionaire was the way he needed to do it, he wasn’t good at business, but always felt that he just loved programming and wanted us to grow up with a few things in life that he couldn’t afford. I love you Dad, and even at 40, I can’t wait to be you when I grow up.