Jeff Jonas was 14 years old when he saw his first computer. It would not be an overstatement to label the experience profound, and completely accurate to call it a revelation. The scriptural resonance of the word “revelation” is not inappropriate; the discovery would launch Jonas on a Pilgrim’s Progress through the landscape of digital information and personal growth.
The journey began in his hometown of Healdsburg, California, on the day his mother, a lawyer, said, “I am going to look at a computer to help me with time and billing.” It was 1979, and the TRS-80 they went to check out at the RadioShack store was the first mass-produced, preassembled PC. It had a giant floppy disk drive and was shipped with four kilobytes of memory.