Back then...

The old uncle next to me at Savera wanted to know if 100 GB and 512 MB was good enough for a laptop for his son. I said, of course uncle. He wondered aloud if the 3 hour battery backup would be fine, and what dual core was, and if 1200 $ was a good price. I nodded and kept answering, but my mind was already on a different track, far from the conversation. Finally he gave up and went away.

And I started writing. This sudden conversation of a father about what laptop he should buy for his son, sent me into a time warp of half a decade. It was the year 1998. The internet was yet to arrive in our little town. Magazines like Chip, PCQuest and IT, delivered by email, fifteen days behind date, with cover stories of billion dollar deals and fancy pictures.

Internet browsing charges were rupees 120 an hour - over dialup. At 56 Kbps, we thought it could never go any faster. Windows 98 was the coolest thing to happen. But DOS was still the big daddy. We all had personal bootable floppies - command.com, IO.sys, msdos.sys. Floppies were the cool thing to carry in those days. Red hat Linux was at release 6. If you said search engines, people would think you were a mechanical engineer. Pentium was still at 2 and RAM was still at 32 MB. Hard drives of more than 5 GB were unheard of. Having your own PC was unheard of. If you had computers in school, and they gave you a 486 to work on, you were god's chosen child. Colored monitors were like Mercedes cars, or maybe a Ferrari. I remember having cycled across town because one guy I knew had bought a colored monitor for his PC. I wanted to see how my code would look in a colored editor.

I was a kid and every night I dreamt of owning a PC. I used to work at a local store part time. Instead of paying me, the guy let me work on his P3 in the off hours. We were doing Pascal in school and I was completely in love with it. I would code away to glory and write all sorts of weird programs - programs that calculated your tax, programs that played tic-tac-toe and chess, and programs that predicted your fortune. Turbo Pascal 7.0. Dos-based editor. Used to fit on a 512 kb floppy. I was crazy about that floppy.

With no internet, no search engines, no tutorial websites or freely downloadable books, learning was slow and extremely experimental. Computer books were always expensive and you were solely dependent on your teacher for almost everything you knew. Even the smallest little discovery made you feel like Einstein. Like the day I figured how to compile exes out of my Pascal source files. I couldn’t sleep all night. Early next morning I rushed to the lab, with the idea of a standalone executable buzzing in my head.


All those were heady days. As kids without internet and in a small town, we missed out a lot of what was happening in the world. But we were having a lot of fun with what we were doing. There was no pressure of coping up with technology, no feeling of how slow your PC was compared to your friends. We never heard songs on the PC, never played games, we didn’t know what jpegs, bmps or mp3s were. It was all black and white. It was all DOS. But it was all yours - right from the moment you booted it. And you knew every single thing that was happening to the old box.