Editorial Comment: What I learned about my dad's business from our survey on technology

For 30 years or so, the world headquarters of Bruno Appliance had no technology more advanced that an adding machine and a rotary phone with two lines. A Bic pen was the word processor and carbon paper was the closest thing to a copy machine. My dad liked it that way. The "headquarters," you see, was a dusky workshop/office in the basement of our home on Staten Island. And the business, which helped raise five kids and enabled my folks to retire to Florida in comfort, did just fine, thank you.

As founder, CEO and chief mechanic of the company, my father wasn't hostile to technology. In fact he sent his oldest son to computer school in the late 70's. (Not me. The smart one, who's now a bank exec in Virginia.) But even back then when my brother Bill tried to woo him with tales of computers mapping his daily routes and organizing his invoices, dad just shrugged. "Not interested," he'd say. Computers, he'd readily admit, were the wave of the future. But this was, and still is, a duct tape and socket wrench kind of guy.