CONFESSIONS OF A DIGITAL JUNKIE ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ (Tribute to Sharifah Aini, who started it all but never quite ended it) You know when things are too smooth and quiet on the western front, its another time for one of those boring Apocryphalist Blast From the Past article, right? This ones from a 2003 or 2004 Symbiosis about the intricacies of the Personal Computer as confronted by a one who knew nuts about it initially. ========================================================== During my entire life I had failed in only two things. Well, being dumped by Pe’ah after refusing to accompany her to go see Sharifah Aini at the school padang after our Form 2 class on that joyous UMNO-sponsored get-to-know-the-rakyat night in the 70’s could hardly be called a “failure” but the other one undoubtedly was... I got an “F” in computing. Oh, never mind I got Big Apples elsewhere in courses ranging from “Landscapes of the East Anglian Downs” up till Relativistic Quantum Fields, but yes. I failed in my first attempt in gaining knowledge - RUDIMENTARY knowledge at that - in computing. And reflecting back, I feel like kicking myself in the butt looking at how lucky youngsters nowadays can be. During my time, computers were not vinyl-boxes sitting on the desktops, playing Britney Spears in the background and calculating spreadsheets while the printer prints the latest report, in colour. When I first took computing courses, we had to punch our commands in line by line. Not only must we be conversant with the programming language that we write your routines in, but also with the set of commands called the Job Control Language that must be written before starting the program. All our commands were written onto a deck of cards. There was no monitor. We couldnt see what we were typing. And about the computer itself: there was no computer. At least we didn’t see any. This mythical machine that we only read about then, existed in a closely-guarded, heavily-cooled room perpetually monitored round-the clock by special monks (Research Assistants, if I’m not mistaken, they were called). What they call the computer was actually a vast array of metal cabinets with lights blinking and gears whirring, making metallic sounds and humming ritual chants, and they ate reels and reels of magnetic tapes and regurgitate reams and reams of outputs. Once, when no one was looking, I peeked in and saw that some of those priests were having their coffee breaks. So, I snuck in. I still remember how I was lured by a sultry-looking knob at the edge of one machine. My curiosity got the better of me and … OK, maybe some computing jobs were stalled that day but I swear I didn’t have anything to do with the infamous NYC blackout of the early 80’s. We had a name for the deck of cards onto which the commands were typed. Since they punched holes to represent the Boolean states of being, (either a 0 or 1) we naturally called them Boole sheets. The fad, obviously, didn’t catch on due to obvious ramifications: “I’m sorry, sir, I left my Boole sheets on the verandah and the dog ate them” or “Alright, class. Turn in your Boole sheets late and that’ll be 10 marks off for each late day” Well then, after you have typed your instructions onto these cards, you SUBMIT them, you see. Typically, a simple program could be around one hundred pieces of cards. But I once was tasked with loading a cabinet-full of cards for my professor to be submitted to the Operator. If you’re lucky, you got your results back from the operator say, in the afternoon. If not, you had to come back the NEXT day (or worse: next week) and collect them. And there were some kind of …. nauseating feeling you get when you brave the hail and snow the next day to be first in line to collect your deck of cards only to be returned back with the note “Error---check your syntax” on it. How was a first time-programmer to know you’re not supposed to have that extra dot in that FORTRAN command? And that’s when I realized that this whole shenanigan is beyond both my intellect and dignity, not to mention patience. To spend a week to get the computer write me a program to calculate factorials? The RM 20 watch cum calculator I bought in Petaling Street could do that now in less than the time you blink. I gave up from becoming excellent in the subject, drew an enviously-straight margin and a most beautiful cursive handwriting of my name on the exam answer sheet, and submitted nothing else. My professor had a Frolickingly Field day of Fully giving me a Fabulously Fantastic grade for Computing 101. Then I told myself: how about I learn computing privately, in the safe environs of my own home, so that you have the least chance of broadcasting your stupidity in case you stumble again in learning the computer? That was when I learnt about the Personal Computer. I still remember buying my first PC. The purchase heralded friends from miles around, reminiscent of that scene in Fiddler on the Roof where Tevye had just gotten a new baby grandson and the entire village of Anatevka was present to greet it. Oh, was I proud of that new PC. It was an out-of-the world 50 pound metal casing powered by a brain they called a Central Processing Unit with a STAGGERING speed of 4.77MHz and 64 (get this!) kilobytes of RAM. The screen was a monochrome monitor attached to the CPU (it was an IBM XT portable) and Microsoft Word version 1.0, together with a 9X9 dot matrix printer produced my thesis and reports that became the source of envy to both mates and colleagues alike. I didn’t grasp the true meaning of the power of the CPU, ergo the computer, until I fed in some numerical computation problems involving some Newton-Raphson algorithm and prrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr….. it churned out the results in a few minutes. I had to pick my jaw up from the floor. Darn it---I did the same calculations with my old trusted calculator, pen and a ream of A4’s and it took me a whole weekend to come up with the same numbers. Welcome to the new age, I both invited and congratulated myself. Some months later, I sold my Ford Granada, skipped eggs in my breakfast and phoned mom less and less frequently, and bought a computer chip the size of my middle finger, called a Math Coprocessor as a result of the frugality. With this baby inserted, my PC burnt rubber! Some kind of “-phile” was born: just that I wasn’t quite sure what kind. Ah, what a feeling it is to be privy to the evolution process unfolding before your very life. I grew old, we changed Agongs, Pe’ah married and had kids and Peter Gabriel lost his hair (yesssssssss! At least I still have mine). The CPU speed had risen from 4.77 to … like 1000 times that speed. The single-monochrome 320 X 200 computer monitor had now given way to multi-million pixels with multi-million colors and the only way you can play Pac Man is by going to the museum. And Pe’ah has still not gotten up to the point of realizing what it was that she had been missing after all these years by dumping me …. Apocryphalist
Posted on: Sun, 06 Jul 2014 15:43:08 +0000
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