I am two decades older than you and, like you, I love computers. I have all my life.
When I was about eight years old, my parents decided to transfer me to a new school because of its curriculum. They did not know it then, and it probably did not even matter to them, but this new school had a computer lab. That was quite remarkable for its time.
I grew up in a very tiny industrial township and this new school was part of the township. The computers in the lab were hand-me-downs from the silica factory around which the township was built. We got only about two hours of time per month in the computer lab but the little time I got there opened up new worlds for me.
Before entering the lab, we had to leave our shoes at the door. 'These are expensive machines. We must keep them free of dust', our teacher would say. It was a ritual. The computers were very old IBM PC compatible machines, mostly with monochrome displays. They had no hard disks at all. They had a few hundred kilobytes of RAM. Every time, we would perform the same ritual. Insert a 5¼-inch floppy disk to load MS-DOS into memory. Then insert another disk to load LOGO. Then write small LOGO programs and watch the turtle move. I have written more about that early LOGO programming experience here: https://susam.net/fd-100.html
It has been over 30 years since then, but the memories and the feelings still remain fresh in my mind. There are times when I can close my eyes and recall the buzzing sound of the dozen or so CPUs running in the lab, the beeps from the power-on self-test (POST) and the distinctive, strangely pleasant smell of the closed air-conditioned room. For some reason, that smell is one of the strongest memories I have from those days. I have never been able to describe it well, but once in a while I encounter it in very unexpected places, like a corridor somewhere, or a store, and it takes me right back to those early days of childhood computing.
Childhood computing forms some of my strongest and most vivid memories. It is such a wonderful experience, full of wonder and exploration. It is very hard to capture that magic again once you grow up.
Wow. This really brought back my own memories of using MS-DOS. For me too it was quite a ritual experience - seeing all the strange text run down the screen as it did things - what are allocation units? What does "freshen files in destination directory" mean? what does DISKPART do? It was like opening a book of secrets.
It also brought back how amazing it was to have a little time with a computer back then. 2 hours a month for you! I too had limited access and I'll always feel rich simply by owning my own big ol' computer.
I’m only a year older, and have a very similar journey. The first computer I can really call mine was an Asus eeePC with 4GB of storage. That thing ran Linux and had a screen so small it couldn’t even render google.com properly, and this was in the early 2010s.
I wrote about it here before but the thing that really fascinated me was the Magalhães, a computer for kids sponsored by our government. It cost 50€, dual booted Windows XP and Linux, and was where I first learned to code with some already outdated for the time HTML tutorials. Then I got some various hand-me-down laptops and desktops until I finally got something for school in 2014-ish and learned to code again by participating in game jams and modding Minecraft (that thing also had some old Celeron and would not run Minecraft at more than 15FPS, but I tried).
Eventually I built my own desktop in 2015, which I am still using to some degree (but that DDR3 is getting painful), and I used Arch on it until I learned about NixOS in university. Ironically that thing is definitely older now than all the hand me downs I had when I got them, but it still works a lot better. That’s also where I finally bought a not-terrible Asus Zenbook that got me through university (also with NixOS, obviously!) and then I started working and stopped using Linux on the desktop and replaced it with running Linux on way too many SBCs…
Rambling over! Thanks for writing this, like you I was making ancient computers last by sheer power of will and not having anything else to do, which definitely contributed greatly to my career.
susam | 6 hours ago
I am two decades older than you and, like you, I love computers. I have all my life.
When I was about eight years old, my parents decided to transfer me to a new school because of its curriculum. They did not know it then, and it probably did not even matter to them, but this new school had a computer lab. That was quite remarkable for its time.
I grew up in a very tiny industrial township and this new school was part of the township. The computers in the lab were hand-me-downs from the silica factory around which the township was built. We got only about two hours of time per month in the computer lab but the little time I got there opened up new worlds for me.
Before entering the lab, we had to leave our shoes at the door. 'These are expensive machines. We must keep them free of dust', our teacher would say. It was a ritual. The computers were very old IBM PC compatible machines, mostly with monochrome displays. They had no hard disks at all. They had a few hundred kilobytes of RAM. Every time, we would perform the same ritual. Insert a 5¼-inch floppy disk to load MS-DOS into memory. Then insert another disk to load LOGO. Then write small LOGO programs and watch the turtle move. I have written more about that early LOGO programming experience here: https://susam.net/fd-100.html
It has been over 30 years since then, but the memories and the feelings still remain fresh in my mind. There are times when I can close my eyes and recall the buzzing sound of the dozen or so CPUs running in the lab, the beeps from the power-on self-test (POST) and the distinctive, strangely pleasant smell of the closed air-conditioned room. For some reason, that smell is one of the strongest memories I have from those days. I have never been able to describe it well, but once in a while I encounter it in very unexpected places, like a corridor somewhere, or a store, and it takes me right back to those early days of childhood computing.
Childhood computing forms some of my strongest and most vivid memories. It is such a wonderful experience, full of wonder and exploration. It is very hard to capture that magic again once you grow up.
decanter | 3 hours ago
Wow. This really brought back my own memories of using MS-DOS. For me too it was quite a ritual experience - seeing all the strange text run down the screen as it did things - what are allocation units? What does "freshen files in destination directory" mean? what does DISKPART do? It was like opening a book of secrets.
It also brought back how amazing it was to have a little time with a computer back then. 2 hours a month for you! I too had limited access and I'll always feel rich simply by owning my own big ol' computer.
pta2002 | 4 hours ago
I’m only a year older, and have a very similar journey. The first computer I can really call mine was an Asus eeePC with 4GB of storage. That thing ran Linux and had a screen so small it couldn’t even render google.com properly, and this was in the early 2010s.
I wrote about it here before but the thing that really fascinated me was the Magalhães, a computer for kids sponsored by our government. It cost 50€, dual booted Windows XP and Linux, and was where I first learned to code with some already outdated for the time HTML tutorials. Then I got some various hand-me-down laptops and desktops until I finally got something for school in 2014-ish and learned to code again by participating in game jams and modding Minecraft (that thing also had some old Celeron and would not run Minecraft at more than 15FPS, but I tried).
Eventually I built my own desktop in 2015, which I am still using to some degree (but that DDR3 is getting painful), and I used Arch on it until I learned about NixOS in university. Ironically that thing is definitely older now than all the hand me downs I had when I got them, but it still works a lot better. That’s also where I finally bought a not-terrible Asus Zenbook that got me through university (also with NixOS, obviously!) and then I started working and stopped using Linux on the desktop and replaced it with running Linux on way too many SBCs…
Rambling over! Thanks for writing this, like you I was making ancient computers last by sheer power of will and not having anything else to do, which definitely contributed greatly to my career.