I was at my ninth class lab room, when I saw this thing for the first time in my life.
Earlier, the news had reached our ears only a few days before that the school had bought the thing for the higher class student’s lab. We had been informed that our class also would get a chance to see the thing during our free period. So, we were eagerly waiting for the day to come.
Two days later, our school lab instructor visited our class, accompanied by our class teacher. Tolerating one teacher’s presence itself was worse and now with the presence of this two, we prepared for a deep sleep. But we surprised as the lab instructor announced that she will be taking us to see the thing. We were amused and started chattering about the thing with our neighbors.
“Before that”, the instructor told, “I will be explaining the basics first and then we will see it for ourselves”. Then she started drawing lines and boxes on the blackboard and gave them strange names like “Input, CPU and Output”. But, with our 8 year’s of expertise in school math, we knew that the diagrams on the blackboard should be called as squares and rectangles. We thought that the lab instructor must have failed in her school math, so we forgave her ignorance.
After the 10 minutes of boring speech, the instructor asked us to stand in line (short fellas first!) and walk to the lab. The lab was located next to the staff room, so we never dared to roam in that area, unless we were forced to carry the notebooks for correction. But this time, as the lab instructor was leading us, we were nearly running to enter into the lab. After a few minutes, we were standing before the thing. The instructor named the thing as THE COMPUTER!!! She sounded like as if the God himself standing before her.
‘THE COMPUTER!!!’ was almost looked like a television box, except with two more extra fittings – a typewriter keypad and one big box, standing next to the monitor. The monitor was dark and we failed to see anything in that black screen. The ‘first-rank-fella’ (a.k.a. the class leader) asked the lab instructor to turn it on, but she replied that the computer was not powered yet. After a few more minutes of ‘computer-looking-drill’, the instructor forced us out of the lab, shouting that the next batch of students were ready to look the computer.
After we returned to our class room, we spent the entire day in speaking the mysteries of the computer. The next day, our class leader told us that we were all fined for 10 RS. Because, during the yesterday’s ‘computer-looking-drill’, an over enthusiastic student had actually broken the rules and touched the keyboard. With this unexpected act, the keyboard then fell down and broken into pieces (keys!?), for which we all had to pay the fine unnecessarily. Thus my first encounter with the computer came to an end.
After that incident, I almost forgot about the computer and concentrated on my studies, until the tenth board exams. Meanwhile, few computer centers also had started appearing in my home town – Aruppukottai. During the exam holidays, most of my friends joined the summer computer courses and I was not an exception. I enrolled my name to the morning 7’O clock batch since I had few other important (!) things to do during the day time.
The first day class reminded me the first lecture by our lab instructor a year before, with the same rectangles and squares on the board named as ‘Input, CPU, Output’, but this time I knew what they meant. After the 10 minutes of introduction, the sir took us to the computer room, where I saw that much number of computers for the first time. There were totally four systems and they were working too. Each computer was shared by two students and I was asked to join one of them.
Since this was the first batch of the day, they had just turned on the computers. I was scared to sit in front of the monitor where the white alphabets were running like maniacs on the black screen. The boy, sitting next to me, had kept on pressing a key on the keyboard. I thought, the computer was asking questions to let the person logged in (like in Sci-fi movies) for which the boy was answering. How clever he was! But later I realized that he was just playing with that button. After some time, finally I got hold of the operating seat.
The first thing I learned was to move the mouse properly. That was a toughest thing to learn, because whenever I tried to move the mouse, I was looking at it, thus loosing the mouse pointer’s position on the screen. After I figured out where the mouse pointer was and checked if it had reached the intended destination, I brought back my sight to the mouse to move it, thus loosing the mouse pointer again. It’s like when you learn a bicycle for the first time, you will never look at the road. Instead, you will be looking at your feet and pedals. The same thing happened in the ‘move-search-check-move’ routine. Bored with my computer operations, the boy sitting next to me lost his patience and pulled back the keyboard and mouse.
But, by this time, it had already clocked 8 in the morning and the instructor shouted “Boys! Move on. The next batch students are waiting. Come tomorrow”.
