The AnT and The Computer

I got my first computer over half my current lifetime ago, on 31st March 1997. It may sound Clichéd, but the Computer actually changed my life. It had such an impact that me and my brother, both ended up becoming Computer Science Engineers. The fact that neither of us ended up in Engineering related jobs is a different matter altogether. For me the computer is an irreplaceable part of my daily life and hardly a day goes by when I do not spend time on it. I fall under the category of people who can spend upwards of 14 hours in a day in front of a computer.

My first memory with a computer is when we started having computer classes in school, back when I was in class IV. I remember having used the computer a few times before that, but for very short times. The school machine was this really primitive 386 which had 640 KB RAM and no hard disk to speak of. It ran on the 5.25’ floppy disks and was used to teach us LOGO and BASIC. DDave and Cats were the games which were played on that and people would be really excited about it. So, when I first got a PC, it was a very powerful 100MHz Pentium based machine running Windows 95 with 16 MB of RAM, a 1.2 GB hard disk and a full coloured display. It was quite a lot to handle at that point of time, but it surely got me fascinated and hooked. Thinking about it, my current cellphone (which is 3 years old) has better specifications than the 1^st computer I owned, which just goes to show the speed at which technology evolves.

It might seem unfair to say this, but my expectation of what a computer could do, and the actual outcome was very different, and in a way I was quite disappointed and disillusioned by the same. Of course, I had very unrealistic and absurd expectations, which I refuse to share, but initially it seemed quite difficult and complicated to figure out how to do things, and activities like changing the wallpaper or screensaver were amongst the more fun things that I could do. I don’t think my family ever intended for me to use the computer purely as an entertainment system, but that is how it ended up being. Even during engineering I remember uninstalling Visual C++ before my exams as I didn’t have enough space to install a new game.

The game that I got free with the computer is definitely one of the most complicated and fun games that I ever played. It took a considerable amount of time and effort for me to eventually finish it, and I don’t think I have ever faced a steeper learning curve, but I guess that is what it takes when u transition from a 6-8 key game controller to a 102 keys keyboard. Yeah, this game did not use a mouse, and I don’t think I would have been dexterous enough to handle a keyboard and a mouse simultaneously at that time.

However, in retrospect, I believe that this particular game had a considerable contribution in my developing a passion for gaming over the years. All my subsequent desktops had been configured in order to provide the best gaming experience. I was actually the only one in my batch to have a computer from the first day when I joined my Engineering College, which was totally unexpected. I used to love this machine as I had configured every single component myself and took care of it as best as I could. I actually used to lug it home during vacations so that I could play games at home, as the one at home was outdated at the time. I will not talk about games in this post though, as it warrants a completely different piece altogether.

This machine gave me countless hours of entertainment but caused a considerable amount of misery whenever it could. Once, during the transition from the second to the third year of Engineering, it decided to conk off, and I was left with a CPU in which the motherboard, RAM, Hard Disc and Graphics Card malfunctioned. In fact, if I think about it I have had multiple run ins with malfunctioning computers which seem to enjoy torturing me and making me miserable and taking away priceless data with its sadistic acts. A considerable amount of time and money had to be put in to get my machine back in shape after the epic Manipal Crash of 2006. The good thing about the crash, if I can call it that, is that I didn’t lose my data and was able to recover it by getting my old hard disc repaired. Also, the new components extended the lifespan of the machine by a few years. I won’t get into the nitty gritties of the trauma that I went through at different stages, as it will just bore everyone to death. A more disastrous crash though were the Multiple failures in Mumbai in 2009 which resulted in my losing a considerable amount of data, the most irreplaceable being the majority of photographs taken during the first year of my MBA. In fact, I have wanted to write this post for a very long time, but was just plain lazy, and one time when I had actually started working on it, my laptop crashed so it got delayed even further.

Enough complaining though, moving on, I got access to the internet back in 1999, and we were amongst the first in the city to have an internet connection at the time, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing. I didn’t have any real friends who were active on the net at that time and social networking was more than half a decade away. Now, I must clarify at this point that this wasn’t a high speed internet, it was a 33.6 kbps dialup which engaged the phone when we were connected to the net, so browsing was difficult, downloading impossible. The internet eventually grew on me and later on gave me access and information about different activities that I was happy to immerse myself in. Now, the internet is like my best friend and I can spend countless hours surfing aimlessly. It is one of my main channels for information, staying in touch with friends and my only source for most of the comics that I read.

The computer is a fascinating machine and if I try to mention how it affects my life and what all I do with it, I could probably go on for ages. I think the best way to explain its utility would be that it tries to satisfy a bit of my inherent curiosity. Whether it is playing games, browsing, or just meddling with it. Fiddling around with the settings has also been quite fun, even if it led to disastrous consequences on several occasions. The biggest accolade I can give to the computer is that despite my love for cars, I decided to be a computer science engineer and not get into automobiles. I did justify that move by considering that computers are a part of automobiles, so I could probably switch later, but as things are at the moment, a career in the auto sector doesn’t seem likely.

It is strange, but I started working lately and my company very generously decided to give me a laptop, which turns out to be the worst computer that I have owned till date. I don’t want to get into the details but it isn’t the kind of machine that I would ever purchase willingly. One thing that I know for sure is that if I didn’t have access to a computer at work, I would probably not be able to last in the office for too long, and I would never really be able to pretend to show the others that I am busy. I am quite certain that amongst inanimate objects the Computer has had one of the most significant impact on my life, exceeded only by the Automobile.

com·put·er (kəm-pyōō'tər)
n.

1. A device that computes, especially a programmable electronic machine that performs high-speed mathematical or logical operations or that assembles, stores, correlates, or otherwise processes information.

2. One who computes.