01/02/24

Write about your first computer.

My first computer was a non branded, probably assembled one in my first place of work- a multinational advertising agency. It was a system that was handed down from Charles Babbage. I used to switch it on at 8am as soon as I walked into office (I was in with the housekeeping, sometimes earlier and definitely not part of the advertising culture) . Then I would go back and pick up a coffee have some breakfast stand by and converse with the lift man, get back to my desk around 930 and it would finish booting up by then. If anything had to be submitted I preferred to use the letter pads and papers from the printer tray. Cos you know it’s faster!

Some of the stuff I picked up from this was, my calligraphy improved. Phenomenally. My OCD went up a couple of notches due to constantly pressing ctrl-S in between random documents and after the first couple of months, after several paragraphs on the same document. I still do this, and I have made sure everyone around me does it if they are working on something for me.

As an aside, did you know Canva auto saves and so does word, but.. OCD and the horrors of missing files most due to not saving! The horrors!!

Anyway, my design / visualisation improved, because I had to hand draw all my work stuff. It was embarrassing to walk around and wait for the system to boot up. I learnt to work on Adobe illustrator and CorelDraw. I could design my own leaflets, because I had to use the designers desktop, cos mine was still booting. Those macintoshes were good!! Coloured monitors and speed – almost as fast as Michael Schumacher in his Ferrari (yea, it was those times).

I hope the company does not take offence, but even they knew I called it Charles Babbage. He would’ve been proud. But as a junior writer, I really could not be picky. And I was just happy to have been given a desk with a computer sitting on it, that I could use. Incidentally this was slower than the hand-me-down desktop I had got back home. And I always felt that was a slow system.

This was also the system without a CD drive, and only a floppy drive. I used to love carrying those black squares around. Such a riot that used to be. If you forgot to label one, then going through various drives to see which one has your files and hope that none of them were corrupted because god forbid you had a virus on them. The anti-virus, was almost as bad as an exorcism. It would run and then reboot the system and that would set me back by ½ a day easily. This is, if there was no virus detected. The one time a virus was detected, I may have as well gone back home. Because I could not access any of my work from the system. Those were the days! Monitor on the CPU on your desk, so the angle of the screen was perfectly level with my eyes.