I clearly remember, it was early 2000s that my parents got me my first PC. Being a very inquisitive and experimental minded kid throughout the childhood, I took no time to fiddle with the beige box, even though I knew squat about it at the time.
In the anticipation of its eventual arrival, I used to spend hours reading an old outdated general computing book that I bought off a newspaper vendor stall. It was thick and had screenshots of many windows 3.x and Windows 95 applications. There were chapters on IE, Word Processor, Gropher, Vines and BBS. I would mindlessly read them without understanding much.
So, no I did not have AMIGA, Apple II or the like. Though, my first encounter previously was with a Windows 3.1 machine, back at junior school. I wish I had started playing with VMS, Multics, Atari, Commodore, etc during adolescent years. The truth is you’d be very lucky to every come across things such as them in small towns where I grew up.
I was too bad at TURTLE in 6th standard, BASIC in 8th standard! Partially because I was always late to the session joining and partially due to my interest in other interesting things that I was discovering around me everyday. Who had time to be interested at the stupid black screen with a blinking cursor?
I’m still bad at many things. But 12 years down the line, I’m in love with that stupid black screen with blinking blank! Dear ‘TERM’.