gotuNandan 's blog

Some thoughts on the Personal Computer in my life July 2, 2009

My experience with Personal Computers (PC)

started off when I was less than 10 years old. My dad had bought a 386 machine which ran DOS when I was probably just a couple of years old. Sometime between then and 10, I started to use a PC. On the  DOS machine, all I did was play ‘games’ which were called “Digger” , “F1″ , “Pacman” , “Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego”, etc. And due to this, I was very familiar with a ‘cd’ command or the fact that you had to type in the name of the game to ‘run’ it.

Sometime after 1995, my uncle bought a shiny new PC with Windows 95 on it.  Bam ! no command line interface and I asked him – “Where do I type ‘cd‘  and then ‘digger‘ ? That was how I was introduced to Windows. Later on in April ’97 we got our a new system which ran the Windows 95 Plus! edition ( I still have that CD somewhere) . By this time the 386 machine had reached its ‘End of Life’ and was no longer in the running. Here too, it was all about the “games” but this time they had newer shinier graphics. I played ‘Cricket 97′, although I distinctly remember being addicted to a demo version of a game known as ‘Wordgames’ (That was its name, believe me !).

But, it was sometime in this period that the “Internet” came home. At that time, the only service provider was VSNL who provided good ‘ol dial up connections. We used a 33600 bps Modem which made all kinds of noises when it connected or even when it did not connect. At that time you had to try 3-4 times to finally get a working connection. And then you hoped that the connection would not drop at any random moment. Initially, though, I was quite ignorant and uninterested in the “Internet” as such. Then sometime in 1998 I got my own email address @hotbot.com and one more @hotmail.com followed soon thereafter. I now had a Pentium II Windows 95 system to play with, and thats what I did. Games like Need For Speed, Fifa 99 and Age of Empires II, Commandos 2, Jedi Knight and more were played for long hours in my free time.

The Internet though still never felt like an important part of my “computer life”. I was still a “gamer” and played multiplayer games over my modem with friends from school, which was an event in itself. Then came the time when Instant Messaging was all the rage among my friends and peers. By this time my @hotbot.com email address was dead and my hotmail inbox with 2MB of capacity regularly ran out of space because of the number of “forwards” that ran amok on the interweb.

Then came GMail, and they changed the concept of web-based free of cost email. Huge inboxes and a slick and fast interface. Many people to this day still do not like it and prefer Yahoo! Mail, but an @gmail.com address soon became my primary mailbox.

It was around late 2005 to early 2006 that I was completely immersed in the Internet. Every bit of information, I needed was available on the Internet and only a few clicks away at max. I stopped watching TV, save european football matches and some tennis and Formula 1. Once a while when a good movie showed up, I watched TV. But that was pretty much the end of my TV viewing and the start of the crazy ‘Internet addiction’.

For all these possibly 12-15 years of using Computers, I used DOS and then Windows, never knowing or bothering (due to various reasons) that other alternatives existed.

But here I am now, on my own laptop (albeit , acquired as an educational requirement), using a GNU/Linux distribution and posting a blog entry on one of the most popular blogging websites around. How did that come about ? Well, in the last year or so, I have opened my eyes to a whole new dimension whose very existence was unknown to me till about 2 years back. I am now a full time GNU/Linux user and am trying to join in the community of hundreds and thousands who make up this exciting universe of Free, Libre & Open Source Software !

That is where this tale ends, for the moment anyway.