My little computer story!

Ever since I was a toddler (a real small, naughty aggressive kid of sorts!), I have been fascinated by computers! And now, I really am amazed at whether I transformed my computers or the machines transformed me! Heck, whatever the case, it’s impossible for me to visualize a ‘me’ without computers (I guess you can tell the nerds early!). It would sound weird, almost abnormal, like a car without ignition, or a girl who doesn’t giggle (still ain’t sure about this one though) 19 years of living with computers might seem a little boring, and a hell lot geeky(but it was not!), and although I’m not so famous that my (approaching) birthday warrants an autobiography, I can at least try for some virtual space!

I was born in 1989, in Nasik, a small city in Maharashtra. In those times, colour TV sets were a rarity in Nasik, and as far I can tell you, computers were totally alien to people there. Back then, they were neither a basic need, nor a luxury; they were just something no one understood. So if you’re a cricket fan this was like a Bouncer, sort of. I was lucky. I was born in a family of technology addicts!! We lived as a joint family, back then. My parents and grandparents used to live in a comfortably big bungalow. Coming back to computers, my first encounter with a computer must have been when I was really really small, about 1-2 years of age! At the expense of sounding filmy, I learnt to handle the computer keys much before I handled a pencil! (to a very large extent this is rather true!) Back then I sure did not do much with the machine rather than play stupid games on it; they were black and white, mind you. There were no fancy graphics, no sound and no windows; just a command prompt, DOS. The computer itself was fascinating. The display was a terribly ugly, helpless white box, an uglier processing unit, had a 13 or 14 inch monitor and made a lot of noise. Sadly, I neither have the memory (nor the inclination) to tell you the configuration of that first ‘computer’; I was way too small to recollect (Sorry geeks!). I do remember the cranky keyboard though. And as many people would tell you, that was the only part worth remembering; the computer was more used like a typewriter in those days. K But you must understand that in those times this was hi-tech! The bleeding edge of technology. My parents had to substantially relieve the bank to buy it! It was probably the first, or second computer in town, and people used to flock at our house in awe to see it. My parents even held lectures on what computers are and what (WHAT) they are capable of. This clearly had a dazzling effect on me; you can never stop wondering at the tiniest thing as a child, can you? Nevertheless I must have been too young to understand the lectures or mum’s computer lessons, but one thing was sure. Computers had caught my imagination. And how!

I was a shy kid back then (and it hasn’t completely worn off even now J); and to cut a long story short, I never really enjoyed my early schooling years, but coming home and getting on the computer was what really kept me going. Most of the time was spent playing 2d black and white games, the rest of the time (if I somehow escaped from the comp!) went in playing out with friends, sleep, food and back-to-school daily ghisa-pita routine. Years rolled by and soon the first computer we owned had become old (ancient, antique! A new one now! Yay!), so now we had to get a new one (Yay yay yaay!!), and I was all excited (yay^yay!!!), and I thought this one had a better white box and a bigger screen, more RAM and more HDD space, (hard-disk drives came with MB memories then!), the processor was an Intel 80286, a 16bit processor, speed must have been around 6Mhz to 25 Mhz (transient memory loss!). And of course the key add-on: this one had a floppy drive!(There were two types of floppies too, one was a huge but thin type, the other was the 3.5 inch hard floppy, 1.4 mb max !) And the zillions of key subtract-ons (although no one realized it at that time): no multi-media, no songs, no videos; in fact people laughed if you said that computers could be used to play songs! Most of the machines then did not even have speakers! But, for me, it was a whole new world! This was the first computer where I really started learning something. I used to sit with mum’s students and try to figure out what they were doing, I quickly grasped the basic DOS commands, dir, cd, cls, and the likes, and I was thrilled! Finally I was getting around on how to actually use the white box, which mum so religiously kept spanking clean all the time. I had figured out by then that the computer was a lot of small parts put together. And it was not long before I had gotten the fundamentals all worked up, in and out. The HDD, the RAM, the processor, the floppy, the i/p o/p devices, printers, monitors, oh boy! I was game for all and more; and for a kid just 7 years into consciousness, this was bang on divine stuff! And, of course, without much ado, perfect show-off material. When your friends are talking about how good the see-saw is and you are talking about processors and megabytes, it gets weird. My friends used to give me freaked-out stares, and I do not blame them; I just feel thankful I’m here, and not there, with them. It must have been difficult for them to digest 16 bit processors at age 7, but a little tweaking of fates and I could’ve been there, gaping foolishly as some other tween blabbered away hard disk drives!

Fast forward a couple of years, and I was in for one more computer upgrade. Now we disposed of the 80286 and got an 80486, 32 bit processor, Microsoft Windows, Graphical user interface; I feasted my eyes on the beast! It was wonderful; now the mouse could be moved around, point-and-click was born. To me, this was a phenomenal idea; it was brilliant! No more typing around to browse files; you point, you click. Double click. Right click. ”Awesome stuff!” I said to myself. Now, I was introduced to things like Notepad™ , MS paint ™, wallpapers, screensavers! Life had never been so galvanizingly different! And me so inquisitive. There was a major revamp in the computing industry. I loved it! The pace at which computers were advancing during this period was sensational. GrandPa invested soon, and he decided to get an Intel Pentium I processor. This beauty was just out in the market and it cost a fortune! I remember going out with mum, I was playing on the road (yeah! We did that often!) and I spotted the computer guy deliver the computer. I still remember; Intel had shipped the processor in a huge box, it had the Intel™ Pentium ™ logo proudly embossed on it. And the best of all, this one had built-in MMX instruction. MMX stood for multi-media instruction, which meant that the processor was now capable of handling multi-media, songs, and videos galore! Probably the only processor of its kind then. And GrandPa was always kind enough to let me play with his Pentium baby! And as if to complete the aura, the stunner boasted of a 13 inch colour display! Man! Was I excited! A few months on, I had to move to Mumbai; dad had been promoted and transferred to the backbone of MH. I missed the Pentium, but I still did fine with the 486!

Bombay couldn’t have been any more different than Nasik. New school, new friends, and more than everything else, a huge cultural change. It was completely cosmopolitan environment, and boasted of as great a humility as its area, and popularity. I was admitted to Holy Cross High School, A Christian school which was almost a 100 years old. The school itself was huge, I mean really really huge; 10 times the people, a class had over 80 people! And you certainly couldn’t count the divisions on your fingers! Here I had computers as a graded subject; it was fun to see that I already knew the entire course before hand. It’s funny because it has always been like that ever since. And finally we trashed the 80486; welcome Celeron! Placed between the Pentium and Pentium II, Celeron was an ordinary horse, Pentium II was the race horse. This was the computer were I was introduced to the Internet, 28.8 kbps (max) connection speed, download at 2 kbps. I still laugh at those figures. You couldn’t even imagine downloading anything like software; movies and stuff would be like, whoa! During those days the internet was page after page of text, HTML; no video and audio. No flash. It was awesome though, mother contacted her friends in the states via email! It was convenient, fast and easy to communicate, I thought. I mean, the first communication service that charged the same for reaching 100 people as for 1 person. Awesome! (When I say Awesome it always has and will continue to mean that I am star struck!)

Learning word processing, spreadsheets, ppts, gaming sometimes, I finally moved on. Computers had now become an integral part of my life; I knew that this was it. This was what I loved to do! Today, I know I was right back then. I stuck to computers. I stuck to windows. The ‘yay’s that had given way to ‘wow!’s, now became ‘oh!’s; it wasn’t as much of the excitement now as it was the thirst for learning and understanding as much as I could. More the appreciation for the intricacy of the equipment than simple superficial joy; the immense scope of the machine was just getting to me! I stuck to learning and evolving every step of the way. This was the time I had more knowledge than most of my friends, and in some cases, more than my computer teachers too. LOGO was fun, basic was fun. It was all happening! I’d finally found something that I truly enjoyed doing, something that came to me effortlessly, something that inherently motivated me and made me burst into warm happiness whenever I thought of it. Something that made me supremely confident in myself. I loved it! And as they say, it’s only when you notice yourself, others start noticing you. Word spread, Pranav(that’s me folks!) was the computer kid.

Easily managing full marks on zero studies in computers was now c:\ake-walk. :D I thought the syllabus we had in school was pathetic. It does sound pathetic when some teacher commits some mistake while teaching and you feel like hitting her! It should be quite the opposite, you know, ideally. J I did bad in everything except computers, science and math; struggled in languages, social sciences, etc.

As the years rolled on, the computer I owned received one too many upgrades, too many I care to remember; more ram and more disk space mostly, a cd writer now substituted for the cd-rom, and the floppy drive was what the computer itself was ashamed of! for those who want to know! During this time though, I played too many games on computers. It had become quite routine (and unsurprising) for my parents of me breaking my bank and travelling with them to Victoria Terminus- here games and other computer related parts were absurdly cheap, although pirated. And mum and dad were very much supportive of my computer addiction! Thank you, mum and dad! It turns really unfair when you’re doing progressive things out of genuine interest, and your parents start suspecting you!

After a continuation of sorts, I got bored of the gaming scene and got back to learning the machine. Hello Programming, Hello World. I started off with simple programs in basic. Not visual basic mind you. Basic. Really old school and really complicated for that age. But it was great (awesome!), what (and whatever) you could do with it. Programming is the key to commanding the beast. Computers are fast and efficient, but not smart. It doesn’t have a brain it can use; WE have. That’s why, at the end of the day, WE are the masters and that is the beast! I made tiny programs to perform basic calculations, fundamental operations, addition, subtraction et al. It was very satisfying. I used to get a warm bubble in my stomach everytime I ran a program successfully (after millions of bug-fixing rounds, of course!) In the meanwhile, I struggled at Hindi in school. I flunked in the language twice. I really thought it was of no use to me (with due respects to the land). Funny, I had topped the class in sciences though.

This was one of the screw ups of my life, and its got nothing to do with computers but I decided to mention it anyway! That year end, I threw the report card out of the window of my school bus. I lied to my parents about my marks. I must have been dumb, because they eventually found out. Since then, I never lied to anyone. I now realize that it’s best to be honest! It saves you trouble! And it’s better to listen to a few minutes of spanking (which is, more than often, actually for your good) rather than sit and break open your head for hours thinking up lucrative all-explaining excuses to cover up your previous excuses. K. Computers on the other hand never lie, so if your stuck between believing the computer and trust the machine. It takes time to understand this, but its worth it!

Learning programming, listening to music and watching movies (and some rare times, studies), let’s fast forward a few years again. I had to move to Poona, dad had been transferred, well, again. New school, new friends, but the typical Marathi culture. The typical miserly behaviour, the typical narrowed thinking. That typical over-professionalism in which the friendliness gets lost. Hell, I missed Mumbai! Guess you just can’t change some things in life. Here I remember those idots in school who ‘thought’ they knew everything about computers, but they were all talking wrong things, I did not bother correcting them, there were too many of those and very few really smart people, the smart people kept a low-profile existence, so it was difficult to find out who they were, I found a few smart people, the stress though still remains on ‘few’. I could not imagine that at age 14, kids around you had started getting girl-friends and boy-friends, although I did not and do not approve or disapprove of anything, this was clearly not my turf(although much better now, it still isn’t my turf!). I still stuck to computers, having friends that approve of your ideas is a blessing in itself, you bet.

Aged 14, I came to Poona as planned; new computer, new hardware, Intel Pentium 4, epic, 64bit CPU, 128 BIT discrete graphics sub system, top of the line bleeding edge, Nvidia Geforce 6600( Shiny XFX box!), half a gig ram, 80 gb space. This was heaven! (Awesome! :D ) By now, after failing a number of times, installing and uninstalling and repairing damages to operating systems, I was capable of installing Windows on any PC. It was no big deal, I managed just fine. Bricking the computer a few (a lot of!) times nevertheless, I got along. I was now more interested in how the stuff worked. The internet was of great help, still is. Ungodly amounts of information are available on the web, if you know where to look. Got caught a few times in school for sneaking CDs in and out, but that was fun too!( I had to bribe the prefet’s in school to keep their mouth shut a lot of times, give him a movie, and shut the hell up!!!)

Finally, I was well-versed with the new computer, how it worked, how it un-worked(ok, maybe that’s not a word!), what had to be connected where (this is inside the box!), what sound meant what, like if there were 3 beeps it meant that the computer did not see the RAM. I knew by heart the Intel standard diagnostic. Amongst the friends, I was still the computer guy. Fiddling with those machines was full of risk, I tell you. At first I did almost finish off many computers. And that’s something that taught me how not to deal with the computers!

Soon, I realized that there was life beyond windows; Linux. Linux was an eye-opener, really. It was free, open-source, fast, secure and efficient. Linux is democracy and windows is communism! The windows machines were really a letdown, the bloatware was really really BLOAT. I ripped the machine to shreds, formatted the drive, installed Linux on it. Every distro I could get my hands on, Red Hat, Ubuntu, fedora, kubuntu, backtrack, OpenSUSE. You name it, I did. With this computer I literally screamed ahead of the other, a lot beyond. I did everything there was to be done, and more. Even to the extent of hacking up and installing the Macintosh OS X Leopard and Tiger and configuring it to run on the machine that had already been tossed around in every direction possible. Thank you, This was insane!! Modbin’s kernels’ , netkas’s kernels, thousands of new kext’s, hacked firmwares, BIOS hacks, this hacked, that hacked! This was beyond computing, this was godlike! You could stare at the apple website and laugh when it read that you could run OS X only on mac’s, I respect Apple for everything they do. But seriously. We can run your OS on OUR hardware. This was like walking on water in computer terms for those who don’t get the idea yet !

Coming down a bit from the awesomeness, I was actually able to run OS X on my PC, and now, any PC really, probably one of the few on this platform to have even dared to do so. This was, by far, the hardest thing I would have ever done. Device Id’s, hex, shell scripts, modifying kexts; getting audio, video, and Ethernet to work, its hours of really hard work, it does not just challenge you but almost intimidates you at times, but like everything else in life, the end is always sweet. Most of you won’t know what I am saying. I am ahead of the times, when it comes to computers. Sorry, I try to remain modest while saying this. I really do.

Then when I was convinced that there was nothing more left to do with the old computer, I broke it down. I did not even leave the processor in place. I lost a Pentium 4 processor, if you are ready to believe that. I was going to make it into a keychain anyway, so probably I just lost a keychain. (told you, I try to be modest J) Convincing dad to spend money again on new hardware was not easy, especially when I was asking him to buy top of the line stuff.

After months of research, THE configuration was finalized. Here goes!

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Penryn 3.0Ghz , OC’d to 3.83 Ghz

Corsair XMS 2, Ultra Low Latency RAM, Heatsinks added, 2 Gb modules clocked at 800Mhz

ASUS P5N-D, Nvidia Nforce 750i SLI chipset, 1333mhz FSB

XFX Geforce 8800GT 512mb Alpha dog edition. Oc’d

Custom Zeb Case, transparent side panel. Led Air Vents .500W PSU

ViewSonic 1912wb.

Logitech Desktop Pro (soon to be MX revolution!)

WD RAPTORS 320gb, 160gb, 80gb.

Some of my friends still laugh at this machine, they look at one side, and whoa its transparent with blue lighting!

There’s a zillion of things I already have already done on this monster. Yep, OS X done. Hacking/Cracking. Done. Programming? Bleak. Linux/Unix. Bleak. Cake-walk !

And I still, further, plan to do a lot of things with this machine. And as the machine gets upgraded, so will its story!

If I have a future, I am rock convinced, it IS going to be computers. And even if I don’t, computers are anyway gonna be around! There are certain things in life, custom-made for you. You just got to discover it! I was lucky as I said, I found my love early, really early.

This is my little incomplete computer story, Written before I go around the sun for the 19^th time. :-D

If you read this, PB thanks you!

P.S.(Funny!!): Comments will be tolerated.