Tech-Nostalgia (Part I)

Sometime in 1992, back in Doha, I was sitting at home, doing my Homework like a normal 7 year old, and my Dad pulls into the driveway. My big bro (12 years old at the time) sprints out and jumps up and down. Dad's got a smile on his face as he gets out and opens the trunk.

Inside, there were 2 big heavy white boxes. I was still trying to figure out what was going on. The excitement was clearly showing on everyone.

I had not much to look forward at that time. There was just that State-run TV that showed 30 minutes of cartoons a day, and otherwise, I was just a kid who sat at home, reading some of the children's books that were lying around.

So we bring the boxes inside, Mom gets a cloth to wipe clean a table we had to put it on. As we unboxed the containers - I saw what looked like a small TV, and a big white metal box. It was a sight to behold at the time: Like some contraption that came from the future. My brother was busy glancing at the manual, and we placed all the equipment one-by-one on the table. After frenzied searching in the manual, we figured out what needs to be plugged into what. So finally, when everything was in place, we said a small prayer and plugged it in to the wall socket and pushed the power switch.

This, my friends was my first contact with a computer. It was an 80286 IBM-Compatible PC manufactured by a Taiwanese company called MiTAC. The specifications (as I remember) were:

• 80286 Intel processor Clocked at 12 MHz
• 4 MB RAM
• 40 MB HDD
• Colour Monitor attached to a VGA Graphics Adapter
• Standard PC-AT 101-key Keyboard

So, we waited in awe as the Computer fired up, Saw many rolling digits (which I know know is the BIOS), and finally this prompt showed up:

C:\>

That’s when we knew that the beast was alive, and ready to take input. So, my brother and I sit on the table, all excited, and type:

C:\>HI

We saw some lights flash, we were scared out of our wits, as the computer took some time to process what we just typed. And then, all of a sudden, the computer spouted out:

Bad command or Filename

OK. The computer was talking back to us, but didn’t make much sense. I thought I'd try to introduce myself. I tried typing:

C:\>MY NAME IS SUHAIL

Again, as the computer tried to process it, it then said the same thing:

Bad command or filename

Dad comes in and says... “Boys! don't spoil the computer by typing garbage. I'll get an engineer to help you people use it.”

So, we then switch of the computer, and after a day's wait, my dad brings home a computer engineer from the company, who taught my big bro some fundamentals. He brought a big bag of 5.25" Disks and put them in one by one and typed so many commands as the computer just kept generating screen after screen of text that made no sense to me. Finally, after my begging my brother later when he left, He taught me the first few commands I’ve ever used on a PC:

C:\>CD GAMES

C:\GAMES>CD PRINCE

C:\GAMES\PRINCE>PRINCE

That, my friends was the point where I fell in love with computers and computer games :)

Meanwhile, check out the promotional video for MS-DOS 5 (the OS described above), back when M$ was desperate for the $$$'s here.

(Re) Introduction - README.1ST

Hi Folks! A few of my previous posts will be surely visible below, those were from a gloomier, depressed and maybe even psychotic period of my Life that I'd like to forget, (a.k.a My B.Tech)... Maybe I’m making it sound worse than it really was, but truth is I'm much better off now than I was back then...

For those of you who don't know me, well I'm Suhail Rehman, now officially MS-2k7 here at IIIT-H. I was born approximately 23 years ago in a place called Doha, Qatar (known more famously for the Asian Games, Al-Jazeera and the 'Doha' round of the WTO talks). I spent my entire childhood there and finished my 12th in 2003, came back to India as an ABCD (Abroad-Born Confused Desi), and spent 4 years of my prime in a Village (kind-of) in mid Kerala to pursue my much coveted (or so I thought) degree in Computer & Engineering at the MES College of Engineering.

As a kid, I was fascinated by computers. My dad brought home an old 80286 desktop when I was in second grade, and back then I started fooling around with DOS 5.0 and all the games that I could find that fit on either a 5.25" or a 1.44" Floppy. The rest was then, basically history, and I was fortunate enough to witness the evolution of personal computing and grow up to be absolutely crazy about them.

Crazy enough not to care about the other things actually, so I was pretty much an 'above-average' kid in school, which is why I landed at the above said college. Life was miserable there, we had no decent Internet access until year 4, and the rest of the posts you see below are remnants of my attempt to blog using my GPRS connection. I'll rant about how messed up life was there in another post, but here, I’m just trying to restart something that I’ve not bothered to do for a very long time...

Meanwhile, now that I'm in IIIT-H, having the time of my life, and indulging in my favorite geek work, let me take this opportunity to thank god and everyone who's supported me throughout the years as I finally ended up in an Institute that actually matters. With this blog, I'll probably post things about my life, maybe a bit of tech, and the occasional rant about missing home (just to justify the existing blog title). And this time, I hope there will be people to read and comment, and I also hope I can do my part to revive the blogging culture here at IIIT, which according to an interestingly anonymous fellow, was once flourishing. Meanwhile, explore the following few posts that I managed to put out on the blogosphere ages back, when the anger was intense and the internet speeds were abysmal.