Last month Jerry took me someplace I never thought he would: the Sunnyvale Public Library. OK…it wasn’t completely out of the ordinary. While I’d like to believe he was indulging me in my love of libraries the real reason we were there was to attend an Atari event.

I’ll admit a peripheral interest in video games. They are the source of my livelihood after all. Not only that but Atari was one of the first “high tech” companies in area, before it was even called the Silicon Valley. That’s history! Give me some history and a library and I’m happy.

We arrived at the event just in time to hear Dan “Father of the Trak-Ball” Kramer. Jerry and Dan knew each other when they both worked at Atari and have been friends ever since. Dan’s talk about his days at Atari and how he developed the Trak-Ball was well received by the crowd.

We had a few hours before the second and main speaker, Al Alcorn, so after a trip to Fry’s Electronics (surprise, surprise) we returned to the library so Jerry could catch up with his old work friends and I could finally explore the library

The Sunnyvale Public Library is in a large, expansive building with plenty of space. This is important since book collections are always expanding and they have a lot of collections. In addition to a big DVD section they also have a lot of foreign language collections including Chinese, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Russian, Spanish and Vietnamese. They even have a special section devoted to trademarks and patents. (A nod to high tech industry no doubt and near and dear to my IP heart.)

The Sunnyvale library also has plenty of room to settle down to read or work which is what I like to do at libraries. There are comfortable chairs placed about and plenty of tables to sit at. There’s even a fireplace to sit by. I finally settled in the quiet area for some precious reading time.

I’ve heard that the Silicon Valley has a lot of very nice public libraries due to contributions from the local high tech companies. The Sunnyvale Public Library is one of them. I’m looking forward to visiting more libraries in the area.