I do not remember the first time I saw a computer. It was perhaps in my dad’s office in 1995. He had described a computer to be “a set of boxes that is capable of doing a lot of magic”. Well, how else could you define something like that to a five- or six-year-old kid who hadn’t yet seen one? The kid hadn’t known what a photocopier or a Xerox machine looked like either. The kid, at the time didn’t understand a thing when his dad, his mum and his uncle spoke about Telex and fax. The names seemed quite complicated to him and he thought them to be some of those magical mantras that could let people do what they can’t on their own.
During summers, I used to visit my granny’s with my parents (mostly mum, coz dad never got that long a leave—two months: you must be kidding me). My uncle (the one mentioned above) once took me to his office. When I was happy playing with a broken telephone dial at his assistant’s desk, which had now gotten replaced by a simpler-to-use interface—the buttons—my uncle called out from his cabin, “Kiddo, come in, I have something interesting to show you!”
The moment I stepped in, I was confused—he ushered me to his computer! I didn’t know how it worked or I didn’t know what to do with it. He sat me down and told me that he’d loaded a game on it. I was partly excited, but majorly anxious. “What do I do to play?”
“It is simple. Do you see these keys? These are the ones that will control your car…” and he gave me a short tutorial on how to drive it without hitting the barricades. It was Indy Car! I was fascinated! I felt that I was really behind the wheels, driving a race car! Come on! At that time, graphics didn’t really matter. I know it was a big deal for the designers back then to create something as amazing as that, which could run on a computer that had zero graphics card memory! But then it was just a DOS game as six-year-olds of today would say—hundred bucks say they don’t even know what DOS is.
After a year or so, when I went to my uncle’s office again, I saw something called Windows 95. Well, that had cool things like screensavers which could play on while my uncle, aunt and I had lunch. I used to wait for the timeout so that the golden clock would appear on the screen and would actually tick! This time, he had another cool game on the computer: Dangerous Dave! It was amazing how the guy could jump and dodge fire. Simple, but looked a lot elegant—hey, everything was in colour! And then he had one more: Paratroopers! Wow, those days!
A couple of years passed and we were in a different place—a remote one this time. We were in Kodinar in the Junagadh district of Gujarat. Dad was with Ambuja Cements Ltd., and his was a cool office. Someone there was talking about Windows 95 and how Windows 98 was better. I didn’t understand what that was. It was a big deal of a difference for the people out there at that time (now I know when I try to tell people how Windows 8.1 Update 1 is better than Windows 8). In school, we were made to sit in front of a computer for the first time—in the 3rd grade. My school’s computer lab was still the traditional DOS one, and everything had to be done with commands. Well, to say the least, we weren’t yet allowed to meddle with commands, so they would launch a session of Logo and hand over the computer to us. Logo was a program that helped kids build logic and understand basic programming concepts, with graphics (that’s all we knew back then). For people who want to learn more on this, here it is on Wikipedia.
It was nice to have that turtle run around and do things. To us students, though FD 60 and RT 90 were all cool, there was something cooler! Computer 1 in the lab was one that had the mouse! I used to take pride telling some of my classmates (whose dads didn’t have computers at their desk yet) how the mouse is cool! It was epic, those days, to us kids.
Zoom, a few years passed and we were probably a generation or two ahead of the computers back in 1997 now, and we had computers with Paint on them. As we memorised Start\Programs\Accessories\Paint, we looked at the mouse on all the computers and were happy about it. Now all the computers were almost the same as… oh wait… Computer 1 had speakers this time and it was now called Multimedia Computer! We remembered that it hadn’t happened before the school closed for the summer in 1999! Oh wait, and what the hell was that thing…
To be continued…