The making of an enthusiast
Introduction
It all started with the summer of 1999. I didnt know what to do that summer. I was fascinated by the idea of a computer. None of my relatives had a computer at home. When did I first see it ? Well I think it was the time when my Uncle returned back from the US. He brought a Mac with him. He showed me a couple of screensavers, played blackjack and chess with me. I used the mouse (it was a single button classic Apple mouse). All that was when I was barely five years old. There were no good GUI's then apart from the Apple Mac's. And a mouse was rather rare. That was the only time I had seen a computer before (you have to believe me on this). Then there was this advertisement in the newspaper offering to teach computer basics for just Rs.500 and that too for six months. I was enthused by the idea. I was the youngest of the lot learning those so-called-basics. It turned out that a large percentage of the people there were people who were pursuing their education is some other field and who decided to have a feel of computers. What did I learn ? Outdated applications . All the work was done predominantly in DOS. And the applications were fore-fathers of the Office suites we see today. They were not GUI's of course. It was a not so fascinating experience.
But DOS was quite interesting , believe me. It turned out after I finished the course that no one was using DOS anymore. But I was glad. DOS offered a lot of insights into the workings of an OS. The first one being the use of "autoexec.bat". I saw an Anti-Virus in use for the first time here . Not many would appreciate its use nowadays. But believe me , viruses were quite destructive in the good old DOS days. I dont remember what it was called but it had the word "CILLIN" in it. And btw we used 5 1/4 floppies those days. They were quite vulnerable stored the same 1.44 MB, and costed Rs.50 :O . I had to run SCANDISK and CHKDISK very frequently. We used to play games like Prince of Persia on those PC's . They were Pentium-I's and that was the era of P-2's . The systems had no hard-disks. We had to carry our own floppies , and run the applications on those. The applications too were tiny for such purposes. Soon, I bought a book on BATCH Programming in DOS. The course also taught me how to use Windows 3.1 (I bet you wouldnt have heard about this ) . This was the predecessor to Windows 95 ( which was the predecessor to Windows 98 ) . Now not many of you would have used these OS's. It was outdated stuff that I was learning.
Gettin Updated
Having learnt all the outdated stuff in the world, I was looking for something more modern. There was a training institute named ZED Career Academy which set shop nearby. The costs were exorbitant. I wanted to go for the cheapest for a start. C/C++ was what I chose finally. I was already into programming coz it was being taught at school (of course in GWBASIC) at that time. So it wasnt too tough. But you can understand the problems faced by a just-into-8th-class guy. Can't u ? The owner of the institute whoever he was gave me an option for the duration of the course -: 3 months , 6 months , 1 year . I chose 1 year coz I wanted to be involved for the greatest amount of time . It started with the header files. The instructor was quite good I must say. I got to program a few things. But the best I could at that time was inputting your marks in the various subjects , calculating the average, total etc. and finally printing the report card. Then the instructor started off with functions. It was a program to calculate the electricity bill and he wrote program and demonstrated to us. The other people who were learning along with me were a Civil Engineering guy and another an ebulliant teenage girl. I was just a kid. I swear I understood nothing abt the program except the printf function which he used to print the output which he stored in a variable. The program had a "bug" the instructor was telling me, the first time the word was used in that sense.
A month passed and we were into "pointers". He was telling something abt addresses. This was strange to me. Totally strange. Crap , I thought . But , I did nod my head now and then to tell him I was listening and understanding. Soon he was talking abt trignometric functions. Oooh , I didnt have a clue about tan , sin , cos. Bull Shit. Then there was GRAPHICS using C. Those were the days when people were talking abt sanctions on India due to the Pokhran explosions. I remember it so well. So , the first thing I did was to simulate tht explosion. A missile ( a very crude model I made , that of a cylinder :P ) strikes on some desert land (a circle I made to resemble tht ) and it explodes ( disappears , I mean I just cleared the screen to get this effect ).
C ended there. I mean the course didnt end. But I didnt do any major things in C after tht. The instructor left. A shithead entered. All that he taught me was shit. Thereafter I programmed less and less and fiddled more and more with the machine. We had brand new P-2's in the institute. Everyday after school I used to spend two hours there learning WINDOWS, playing games ( I remember Diablo particualrly well ) , etc. Internet in those days was as rare as water in a desert. In Vizag it was it in infancy I believe at that time. And I had to work on offline PC's ( you would dread to imagine life on such PC's) . No movies . No songs.
Then suddenly one day the institute decided to shift from Windows 98 (which we were using then ) to Windows NT Workstation. That was a major shift. NT had a new kernel. It didnot need DOS to boot itself. And then we had to use Limited-Privilege accounts. In 98 you just had to press Esc and you could circumvent all forms of password protection. Not so in NT. There was an administrator account whose password we didnt know. And it was hell operating with those limited priviliges. There was a new Server purchased by them. It ran Windows NT Server version. It was primarily used as a file server. It was at this point of time that I got the first chance to see this so-called "internet" thing.
I had many misconceptions about the internet back then. I thought it was like some library with a BIGGGGGGGG PC located somewhere in the US which could be accessed by people. I thought there would be a guide (something like a book) to assist you in accessing the internet. But it was not to be. I was surprised by how it looked. You had to rememeber the site names etc. I was excited about the email-thing. Back then there was no such thing called a messenger. There was web-chat of course which was implemented with the help of JAVA in many website including YAHOO.
In a Web Cafe
It was my first visit to a web-cafe. It was air-conditioned. The PC's were brand new. We had a list of sites which we managed to gather somehow ( some ten website addresses which we managed to gather ) and started entering them one by one. Internet was pretty slow back then. Just maybe 0.8 kilobytes/sec or 0.8 * 8 = 6.4 kilobits/sec. Just to remind you that a good connection should give you a speed of 5 kilbytes/sec or 40 kilobits/sec. And a broadband connection today gives you 32 kBps or 256 kilobits/sec.
After the C course I needed to do something else to continue my interest. I opted for Visual Basic & SQL. We did a lot of GUI programming those days. My partner was a tenth-class-guy. He too was considered young in the institute. That was also the time when I started to read the magazine CHIP. My 10th class friend used to get it for me. It had a lot of URL's which we thought we could explore. So we decided to surf the internet for the second time. The cost of browsing back then was Rs.50 per hour. We shared the money. And finally after 50 minutes of browsing , I turned my head over and saw a guy viewing a NUDE picture. Ooohh , that was the first time I saw a female nude. I turned my head ( the reaction you would expect from an 8th-class-guy). I didnt turn my head again to view that ( I was amazed ). One day in the institute I noticed a guys seeing those pics. He had evidently copied them to the PC through a floppy. My friend was excited abt seeing those after he left. But I advised him it was too dangerous watching them publicly. So we decided we were going to code a GUI in Visual Basic which would make it easy for us to browse the pics. As soon as someone entered we would press a key which would trigger an event in Visual Basic to clear the pic which we were watching. That was the first practical use of GUI programming. That was how life went on.
Life After that
Soon I got MY PC in February, 2001. I remember it so well. I was very particular about buying it after the Y2K problem subsided. By then internet was popular. I accessed internet using the telephone those days and was very particular about minimizing the duration. In those days we were told "IE and Netscape Navigator are the only good browsers in the world ". "Opera is an alternative." I was quite used to using Internet Explorer. Let me be frank , I didnt know about linux, Richard Stallman n GNU, OSS back then. So I cultivated the habit of opening as many windows as possible. ( There wasnt the concept of TABS back then ) I used to save most pages for later viewing and adopted many other measures to minimize my father's telephone bill. There was a good program I wrote back then. Everytime I got connected to the internet it used to open in the background and log the number of minutes I was browsing the net and the cost my father was incurring consequently. Back then Visual Basic was my favourite programming language.
Then one day we heard abt the local cable guy offering internet using the cable wire. It was an interesting concept. It was unlimited internet that he was offering and at Rs.12000 per annum. I wanted it badly. My father considered it a good prospect considering the benefits I would reap from it. Soon I was browsing my way on the internet highway. I downloaded a lot of demos of computer games from the internet. For many days I stopped reading the newspapers. I was already reading the news on web-pages. My father didnt allow me to use web-chat , coz he thought I would be "spoiled" by talking to strangers. I heeded to his advise. To this day I dont talk to strangers on the web. Those were the days I started to use Google-search. I was an Altavista fan back then. Google was the hottest thing then. I didnt want to switch to Google but it pulled me in. Do you know how many times in a week I use nowadays ? (Atleast a five hundred times , believe me ) That was the start and I didnt turn back. I became a vigorous user of google . We had projects in ICSE. I did most of my projects taking help from the internet. In stark contrast none of my classmates ever ventured to use the internet.
Occasionally I used to watch PORN but not much . Finally I got caught watching it one day. My mother was moved to tears. I promised her I wouldnt do this again. I used to write a diary back then. The diary was transparent. It had ALLLL my deeds. I wouldnt hide even one. She read that too. There was not much to hide except this issue. It was sorted out for good though. At school I displayed programming skills and did well in the board exams too . I remember we used to work on DOS machines at school . There was a command which would broadcast a message from one computer to another across the network ( We used to have a network of five PC's ) . And one day I wanted to trouble my classmate. So I used the system command to invoke it from the GWBASIC interpreter and ran it in a loop to trouble him with broadcast messages and prevent him from doing his coding stuff.
And in 11th class (when you are supposed to be totally concentrated on your studies ) I spent a lot of time playing "Age of Empires - The Conquerors Version" . Of course I didnt stop watching PORN. But it was occasional. In those days I used to practise REIKI everyday (suggested by my teacher). REIKI required a peaceful atmosphere. There was a cassette which I received , it contained a pleasant music. Now the problem was that I needed to switch from one posture to another after every two minutes or so. How was I to be informed about switching the posture after two minutes ? Most of the cassettes have the every-two-minute ding-dongs pre-recorded. The music that I had chosen didnt. Now what could I do, I thought. A few days passed. I read an article in PC-Quest about converting between the various audio formats. About converting from WAV to MP3 MP3 to RAM etc. etc. Now the article also mentioned that for recording cassettes onto the hard disk audio-processing tools are required.
Introduction
It all started with the summer of 1999. I didnt know what to do that summer. I was fascinated by the idea of a computer. None of my relatives had a computer at home. When did I first see it ? Well I think it was the time when my Uncle returned back from the US. He brought a Mac with him. He showed me a couple of screensavers, played blackjack and chess with me. I used the mouse (it was a single button classic Apple mouse). All that was when I was barely five years old. There were no good GUI's then apart from the Apple Mac's. And a mouse was rather rare. That was the only time I had seen a computer before (you have to believe me on this). Then there was this advertisement in the newspaper offering to teach computer basics for just Rs.500 and that too for six months. I was enthused by the idea. I was the youngest of the lot learning those so-called-basics. It turned out that a large percentage of the people there were people who were pursuing their education is some other field and who decided to have a feel of computers. What did I learn ? Outdated applications . All the work was done predominantly in DOS. And the applications were fore-fathers of the Office suites we see today. They were not GUI's of course. It was a not so fascinating experience.
But DOS was quite interesting , believe me. It turned out after I finished the course that no one was using DOS anymore. But I was glad. DOS offered a lot of insights into the workings of an OS. The first one being the use of "autoexec.bat". I saw an Anti-Virus in use for the first time here . Not many would appreciate its use nowadays. But believe me , viruses were quite destructive in the good old DOS days. I dont remember what it was called but it had the word "CILLIN" in it. And btw we used 5 1/4 floppies those days. They were quite vulnerable stored the same 1.44 MB, and costed Rs.50 :O . I had to run SCANDISK and CHKDISK very frequently. We used to play games like Prince of Persia on those PC's . They were Pentium-I's and that was the era of P-2's . The systems had no hard-disks. We had to carry our own floppies , and run the applications on those. The applications too were tiny for such purposes. Soon, I bought a book on BATCH Programming in DOS. The course also taught me how to use Windows 3.1 (I bet you wouldnt have heard about this ) . This was the predecessor to Windows 95 ( which was the predecessor to Windows 98 ) . Now not many of you would have used these OS's. It was outdated stuff that I was learning.
Gettin Updated
Having learnt all the outdated stuff in the world, I was looking for something more modern. There was a training institute named ZED Career Academy which set shop nearby. The costs were exorbitant. I wanted to go for the cheapest for a start. C/C++ was what I chose finally. I was already into programming coz it was being taught at school (of course in GWBASIC) at that time. So it wasnt too tough. But you can understand the problems faced by a just-into-8th-class guy. Can't u ? The owner of the institute whoever he was gave me an option for the duration of the course -: 3 months , 6 months , 1 year . I chose 1 year coz I wanted to be involved for the greatest amount of time . It started with the header files. The instructor was quite good I must say. I got to program a few things. But the best I could at that time was inputting your marks in the various subjects , calculating the average, total etc. and finally printing the report card. Then the instructor started off with functions. It was a program to calculate the electricity bill and he wrote program and demonstrated to us. The other people who were learning along with me were a Civil Engineering guy and another an ebulliant teenage girl. I was just a kid. I swear I understood nothing abt the program except the printf function which he used to print the output which he stored in a variable. The program had a "bug" the instructor was telling me, the first time the word was used in that sense.
A month passed and we were into "pointers". He was telling something abt addresses. This was strange to me. Totally strange. Crap , I thought . But , I did nod my head now and then to tell him I was listening and understanding. Soon he was talking abt trignometric functions. Oooh , I didnt have a clue about tan , sin , cos. Bull Shit. Then there was GRAPHICS using C. Those were the days when people were talking abt sanctions on India due to the Pokhran explosions. I remember it so well. So , the first thing I did was to simulate tht explosion. A missile ( a very crude model I made , that of a cylinder :P ) strikes on some desert land (a circle I made to resemble tht ) and it explodes ( disappears , I mean I just cleared the screen to get this effect ).
C ended there. I mean the course didnt end. But I didnt do any major things in C after tht. The instructor left. A shithead entered. All that he taught me was shit. Thereafter I programmed less and less and fiddled more and more with the machine. We had brand new P-2's in the institute. Everyday after school I used to spend two hours there learning WINDOWS, playing games ( I remember Diablo particualrly well ) , etc. Internet in those days was as rare as water in a desert. In Vizag it was it in infancy I believe at that time. And I had to work on offline PC's ( you would dread to imagine life on such PC's) . No movies . No songs.
Then suddenly one day the institute decided to shift from Windows 98 (which we were using then ) to Windows NT Workstation. That was a major shift. NT had a new kernel. It didnot need DOS to boot itself. And then we had to use Limited-Privilege accounts. In 98 you just had to press Esc and you could circumvent all forms of password protection. Not so in NT. There was an administrator account whose password we didnt know. And it was hell operating with those limited priviliges. There was a new Server purchased by them. It ran Windows NT Server version. It was primarily used as a file server. It was at this point of time that I got the first chance to see this so-called "internet" thing.
I had many misconceptions about the internet back then. I thought it was like some library with a BIGGGGGGGG PC located somewhere in the US which could be accessed by people. I thought there would be a guide (something like a book) to assist you in accessing the internet. But it was not to be. I was surprised by how it looked. You had to rememeber the site names etc. I was excited about the email-thing. Back then there was no such thing called a messenger. There was web-chat of course which was implemented with the help of JAVA in many website including YAHOO.
In a Web Cafe
It was my first visit to a web-cafe. It was air-conditioned. The PC's were brand new. We had a list of sites which we managed to gather somehow ( some ten website addresses which we managed to gather ) and started entering them one by one. Internet was pretty slow back then. Just maybe 0.8 kilobytes/sec or 0.8 * 8 = 6.4 kilobits/sec. Just to remind you that a good connection should give you a speed of 5 kilbytes/sec or 40 kilobits/sec. And a broadband connection today gives you 32 kBps or 256 kilobits/sec.
After the C course I needed to do something else to continue my interest. I opted for Visual Basic & SQL. We did a lot of GUI programming those days. My partner was a tenth-class-guy. He too was considered young in the institute. That was also the time when I started to read the magazine CHIP. My 10th class friend used to get it for me. It had a lot of URL's which we thought we could explore. So we decided to surf the internet for the second time. The cost of browsing back then was Rs.50 per hour. We shared the money. And finally after 50 minutes of browsing , I turned my head over and saw a guy viewing a NUDE picture. Ooohh , that was the first time I saw a female nude. I turned my head ( the reaction you would expect from an 8th-class-guy). I didnt turn my head again to view that ( I was amazed ). One day in the institute I noticed a guys seeing those pics. He had evidently copied them to the PC through a floppy. My friend was excited abt seeing those after he left. But I advised him it was too dangerous watching them publicly. So we decided we were going to code a GUI in Visual Basic which would make it easy for us to browse the pics. As soon as someone entered we would press a key which would trigger an event in Visual Basic to clear the pic which we were watching. That was the first practical use of GUI programming. That was how life went on.
Life After that
Soon I got MY PC in February, 2001. I remember it so well. I was very particular about buying it after the Y2K problem subsided. By then internet was popular. I accessed internet using the telephone those days and was very particular about minimizing the duration. In those days we were told "IE and Netscape Navigator are the only good browsers in the world ". "Opera is an alternative." I was quite used to using Internet Explorer. Let me be frank , I didnt know about linux, Richard Stallman n GNU, OSS back then. So I cultivated the habit of opening as many windows as possible. ( There wasnt the concept of TABS back then ) I used to save most pages for later viewing and adopted many other measures to minimize my father's telephone bill. There was a good program I wrote back then. Everytime I got connected to the internet it used to open in the background and log the number of minutes I was browsing the net and the cost my father was incurring consequently. Back then Visual Basic was my favourite programming language.
Then one day we heard abt the local cable guy offering internet using the cable wire. It was an interesting concept. It was unlimited internet that he was offering and at Rs.12000 per annum. I wanted it badly. My father considered it a good prospect considering the benefits I would reap from it. Soon I was browsing my way on the internet highway. I downloaded a lot of demos of computer games from the internet. For many days I stopped reading the newspapers. I was already reading the news on web-pages. My father didnt allow me to use web-chat , coz he thought I would be "spoiled" by talking to strangers. I heeded to his advise. To this day I dont talk to strangers on the web. Those were the days I started to use Google-search. I was an Altavista fan back then. Google was the hottest thing then. I didnt want to switch to Google but it pulled me in. Do you know how many times in a week I use nowadays ? (Atleast a five hundred times , believe me ) That was the start and I didnt turn back. I became a vigorous user of google . We had projects in ICSE. I did most of my projects taking help from the internet. In stark contrast none of my classmates ever ventured to use the internet.
Occasionally I used to watch PORN but not much . Finally I got caught watching it one day. My mother was moved to tears. I promised her I wouldnt do this again. I used to write a diary back then. The diary was transparent. It had ALLLL my deeds. I wouldnt hide even one. She read that too. There was not much to hide except this issue. It was sorted out for good though. At school I displayed programming skills and did well in the board exams too . I remember we used to work on DOS machines at school . There was a command which would broadcast a message from one computer to another across the network ( We used to have a network of five PC's ) . And one day I wanted to trouble my classmate. So I used the system command to invoke it from the GWBASIC interpreter and ran it in a loop to trouble him with broadcast messages and prevent him from doing his coding stuff.
And in 11th class (when you are supposed to be totally concentrated on your studies ) I spent a lot of time playing "Age of Empires - The Conquerors Version" . Of course I didnt stop watching PORN. But it was occasional. In those days I used to practise REIKI everyday (suggested by my teacher). REIKI required a peaceful atmosphere. There was a cassette which I received , it contained a pleasant music. Now the problem was that I needed to switch from one posture to another after every two minutes or so. How was I to be informed about switching the posture after two minutes ? Most of the cassettes have the every-two-minute ding-dongs pre-recorded. The music that I had chosen didnt. Now what could I do, I thought. A few days passed. I read an article in PC-Quest about converting between the various audio formats. About converting from WAV to MP3 MP3 to RAM etc. etc. Now the article also mentioned that for recording cassettes onto the hard disk audio-processing tools are required.
posted by Sleeper @ 7:24 AM
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