| My Love with
Computers ...
.... computers
... yes those dumb machines. I still remember my first computer ,
sincliar ZX Spectrum , I was around 5 years or so when I used it
first , the thing that attracted me most about this particular
machine was its neat design , although at 5 I hardly knew anything
about designs but it was attractive. After sinclair , I got
acquainted with Amstrad PC 8256 which had a green color monitor
and floppy was inserted in the monitor. As a kid I was all for
games but Amstrad brand had only two games , chess and Space
Invaders . But we disposed off this particular system for 120
Dinars (in Bahrain). After during Amstrad , we for the first time
bought a PC , XT , which had EGA display with only 16 colors but
these 16 colors were the most attractive after using the green
color monitor. By that time I was already familiar with Basic
language and already mastered DOS, DOS and not MS DOS because I
had the opportunity to use PC DOS. That was the beginning of my
quest. I still remember using a software by the title of PC Tools
, not much was attractive about this particular software except
that it was bundled with lots of utilities which could change
background colors and stuff like that. Talking about graphics ,
during the XT age I also got a Commodore 64 from a friend as a
gift. Commodore of all the computers I used was beautiful when it
came to graphics , I couldn't believe my eyes when I
could actually play Cricket (my fav. sports) on that system , it
was amazing at that time. Commodore 64 was a beauty , as with
Sinclair Spectrum it came only with a keyboard and a drive , used
to plug it on a TV and the Disk Drive was the size of
current Laptops and it used to make lots of noise when a new disk
was loaded from it, although that sound was irritating for my
parents and siblings but it was music to my ears. Commodore 64
also allowed to program BASIC language like Sinclair Spectrum.
Between those XT and commodore years my love for computers was so
extreme that I formed a circle of computer freak friends. My
friend (Bahraini by Origin) had an Amiga which was even better
than commodore 64, it was more like X-BOX (recently brought out by
Microsoft). Amiga was a Game machine , we played monkey island I
and Beneath the Steel Sky and other adventure games on that very
computer. But let me continue on the trend of my interaction with
computers. After XT , I bought 386 SX , skipped one generation of
286. 386 Sx had a ram of 2mb and it was gold for me. By the way ,
this computer was bought from a chef who was to leave for Canada
shortly. 386 Sx , yes the memory competition comes to my mind when
I think of 386 , since it had only 2 Mb of Ram or page memory ,
and as DOS games and programs require conventional memory , so I
had to use my batch programming skills and some tricks with QEMM (Mem.
manager for DOS) to actually play even the simplest of the games.
I was at that time aware of Microsoft (Monopoly Kings), with 386 I
had already used MS-DOS ver 5.0 , and windows 3.0, 3.1 and for
workgroups. Using MS Word 2.0 was perhaps like a miracle of a
feeling , since I was really used to Word Star , Word
Perfect and for database related I used Lotus 123 or Dbase 3 ,thus
Word and Excel amazed me a lot. I never sold 386 in Bahrain but
sold it later when I took it back to Pakistan (after
living in Bahrain for around 8-9 years). After 386 , my troubles
had already started because Intel was coming with newer chips ,
fitting more and more transistors and I had to upgrade all the
time. After 386 Sx I straight away went for Pentium PC's , 166 MHZ
Pentium I was he first in the line. Then came P II MMX ,
Cyrix Processor followed by Celeron , currently I own a P III ,
with 128 mb ram and I feel left out from others. Throughout my
life I have used lots of Operating systems and other amazing
packages but all those details are given in my Resume.
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