My First PC

I have faint memories of my first PC. The year was 1994. I was 9 years old. PC's were something new in India. It was considered a "rich man's" calculator. So, I remember strolling along with my brother & dad into a company called "Minicomp". These guys were one of the first PC dealers in Chennai.

As a little boy wearing knickers & not knowing what PC or Computer really meant, I was told "You will not be allowed to play games". I was furious. How can this new thing we are buying into the family be off-limits to the cutest, chubbiest, second son in the family? After all, I used to get all the attention at home being the second kid. Hey, all second kids do. Ask anyone who was born first & they will recount stories of favoritism of parents to their younger siblings.

In the Minicomp office, there was this fat businessman. In his 40s. He did not have much knowledge of Computers other than the price list each configuration went for. And to every line, he used to add "Our service is great. Other guys will give you the product & vanish. We are there for support" Being the youngest one in the room, I was more interested in the free chai that was given. Also, the air conditioning was something that was new to me, so I basked in the A/C that was being blasted from a 1.5tonne window unit.

My brother had some configurations he wanted to buy in a computer. My dad had only one. The price had to be less than 20k. Anything that comes to 20k was fine. After a lot of bargaining and hardselling, we settled for one which was going to cost 32k. This was to be purchased in installments in the form of Post dated cheques. PDCs were very common in the 90s till Reliance Mobile came & ruined it.

So, there we stood. One of the few people in our colony to own a PC. Bought at an overhead to my dad's already meager salary. Thankfully, mom was teaching & her school was taken over by the central government. So, we could afford the big buy. As 3 guys came over to our house with the mammoth like PC, me & bro stood amazed. The sheer size of the Monitor (monochrome) and the CPU left us baffled. This machine is what costed 32k we pondered.

Once the PC was installed, there were rules to using it. I was not allowed to touch it without my brother's permission (oh, how I hated him for having all the power to access the PC). And so began my journey into Electornics & IT. We had a TCP/IP dialup connection. Modem with 14.4kbps as maximum dialling speed. VSNL account that had to be accessed using Hyperterminal with a username/password. No graphics, only unix style internet access.

It was fun using that PC. I used to play games like "Doom", "Dave" and "Duel". We upgraded it in a couple of years time to accomodate Windows 95 & a sound card (Creative Sound Blaster AC'95). The original configuration read something like Intel 386, 8MB RAM, 540MB Hard Disk, 3'44'' Floppy diskette drive, MS-DOS operating system (5.1 i think Update: It was Windows 3.1 on top of DOS 5.1), Comptech Monochrome monitor, Microtek Dialup external modem with maximum speed 14.4kbps.. Man, it was a super cool PC.

I had friends over & used to play Fifa (the first one) and Duel. Thinking about those days, brings a lot of nostalgia. The moulding of a half-geek (no, I won't admit I'm a tech geek ) who ended up taking to discrete mathematics & computer algorithms like he does to sambar vadai & mini idlis. To this day, I cherish the memories of touching my first PC, being lucky enough to adapt to a new world order. 3 Cheers to Monochrome PC users. We are an ancient species.

P.S: Minicomp didn't survive after 1996. They shut shop!