Childhood Computing
Work-in-Progress.
After reading Childhood Computing by Susam Pal, I decided it’s time to recollect and write about my childhood computing. It will not be as interesting as them, but I want to have it for the archives so future-me can read and have fun.
Let’s start with a confession. I was no longer a child by then, but I still like to remember that as my childhood computing.
In our small town, our school was among those that introduced computers early. It was introduced as part of an optional curriculum in the ’90s. We had to pay ₹50 each month to be part of the computer class. It changed my life.
For our class, there were just about five computers, and we were too many. So, I started a revolt that computers were useless for school, and hampered our study for the upcoming 10th exam. Everyone signed the letter that I wrote to the principal, and he agreed to let only those who wanted to stay behind and join the classes. Almost everyone decided to withdraw. A few of my friends and I remained. We were the only ones studying computers. We all had one, sometimes more, computer each during our classes. I’m a bad person.
I wrote my first program in QBasic on those. I saved all of my programs on a 5.25-inch floppy disk. That was one of my most prized possessions. Unfortunately, I lost it when I left my hometown for Bombay.
I also had a cousin who everyone thinks is crazy and weird. He was the first one to have a personal computer at home during the early ’90s. I used to visit him just to hear him talk. He was also the person to suggest way early that the Internet would change everything: “You can do anything, anywhere, from a computer connected to the Internet.” This story was from before the Internet was even introduced in India on Aug 15, 1995, and even way it reached my hometown.
My first brush with a laptop was when a local uncle handed me an IBM laptop for a church to look at to see if I could fix it. I’m not very sure what it was, but I think we got it fixed to an OK state by reloading a fresh AUTOEXEC.BAT. We just had to make sure it can run WordStar. This is how I remember it, and unfortunately that uncle passed away before I could bring up that story again.
I even went on an adventure that I will remember the rest of my life. I went to repair computers at an army camp, accompanied by my childhood friend, who had absolutely no clue about computers.
I also remember visiting a computer show at an upscale hotel. I replaced the shutdown screen (it is just a BMP image) with something in MS Paint and they thought they got “hacked.”