PC Shenanigans!! My tryst with computers began in 1993, when I was in the VIII grade at MV Herwadkar English School. We were taught to operate on the then all new improved Disk Operating System. Computers was a never a part of curriculum at school, it was just a voluntary-paid-value added extra class, each day before the regular school began. The first 8 to 15 days, we were bombarded with PC terminology – the CPU, ALU, HDD, FDD, RAM, ROM etc and back then as boys we were bamboozled by the number of acronyms that were forced upon us. The only refreshing factor of the computer classes was that alternate days, we were asked to operate the computer in our practical classes (2 students per computer). Initially me and one of my close friends thought of doing the practicals together but 2 sessions down the line, we thought it would be better off if we can change our partners for the better, because both of us wanted to so many things on the computer, that either the time or the computer gave up and both of us left with an unsatisfied mind. We strategically chose our partners amongst those who were still coping up with this new wonder called computer. This meant that 2 PCs were controlled by me and my friend with each having an associate who by their choice or force had to resort to watching what we were doing. After the practical’s, me and my friend discussed each of our accomplishments (read pranks and mischiefs). It was fun at that age, to type our names and try different fonts (limited @ that particular time) in different shades of grey (no color monitors available) or green (monochrome monitors). There were times, when we played some games, drew some pictures and sometimes printed our work on that old workhorse printer who made more noise than the actual print (of course without informing the computer lab teacher).
Years flew by, but I never got a chance to flaunt my PC skills, until my engineering days, when PC became a part and parcel of our syllabus. The first year we had Programming with FORTRAN – the first computer language that we learnt. It was fun to apply logic and complete those different sets of programs using arrays, procedures, functions etc. However, I still recall that dreadful morning of our first semester exams in FORTRAN programming. It was an early morning start @ 8:00 am and we were told to pull out a sheet of paper among many where in different problem statements that was to be programmed, was written. My luck deserted me when I pulled out a paper which had the toughest program of the lot (I got to know this, because only 2 of us out of the overall 50 managed to complete this). I split my hair apart, banged my head, refurbished my grey cells, yet until 10:30 am, I had no clue, how I would complete that program. I had started accepting doom, when suddenly I made my changes in the program that I had written and the program worked. I called the exam invigilator and he with a wicked smile, started verifying my program by pulling out a set of numbers that were supposed to be the worst set for the program to crash. He put in the numbers and to both our surprise, the program worked @ exactly 10:57 am. I still cannot forget the astonishment on his face. The marks in the exam did astonish me because not every practical exam would you score 96.
The finishing years of the last century coincided with the initial growth phase of the internet (at least in India). Internet – mailbox and chatting was the buzz of every town. We as budding tech-savvy engineers, then were much attracted to the e-world that we drove 6 kms and literally paid @ 120 Rs an hour to explore what is emailing and chatting. We each had email addresses which were not given to anybody else and was just used to send a hi, for a friend who was not with us at that particular moment of time. Slowly upgraded ourselves to chatting – since we had limited contact with friends out of town, we naturally resorted to mass-chatting centers. We quickly got acquainted with ASL code and also the fact that there existed an allergy among various chatters with the 19/M/India. Well, not much option was left when u hv paid 120 Rs and browsed all the websites that you know, but to resort to some pranks and so we tried a new ASL code 18/F/India and sent a buzz to my mate sitting in the adjoining cubicle and he was confused, perplexed, mystified, bewildered, excited, animated, overwhelmed and what not to get a rare request. He quickly called me into his cubicle to see what he had got (in fact he was the one who had pleaded for a separate cubicle himself, when I was insisting on a single comp, regardless of the money factor, since he wanted privacy and solace for himself – He thought finally the efforts were worth it). Chatting continued between 2 of us sitting in adjoining cubicles – Can’t recall how he got it, but he smartly caught the source of mischief. We quickly teamed up to fox a common friend with the same trick – 10 years down the lane, this smart chap still believes that the so called virtual Rakhee Deshmukh exists and she is settled in US with her hubby and a kiddo. Six of us (read Rakhee), share a common ID – write update mails to this guy, chat with him occasionally (the frequency has reduced considerably after he got married), he discusses his problems with us (read her) and believe it or not even sent him photographs!! (He also sends lot of his photos to her – In fact she is in the mailing group as us) The pinnacle of the prank was reached when he expressed his desire to meet Rakhee when he would be in Bangalore for an official work. Poor chap was left stranded waiting in a hang out place on Brigade Road (Alas, only me missed out to enjoy that scene!!)
Not too long ago, (If you are one of those who believe that a decade is a long time – ignore the header!!) 3.5” floppies ruled the show and were one of the biggest revolutions in IT industry considering that their predecessors – 5.25” & 8” floppies never fitted in a shirt pocket, plus the fact that the small disk stored more bytes. But the floppies contained only 1.44 MB, not even 1/4th of the memory space required to store a MP3 song. One of my friend desperately needed songs from the film ‘Taal’ and ‘Refugee’ on his PC and back then there were no music portals. Luckily we managed to find them stored in one of our computer labs, now how the mission was how to take the songs to his computer. Various options including zipping the file, buying a CD writer for our college lab, bringing his hard disk and taking the college hard disk homes were discussed – Luckily sanity prevailed. We managed to search out software on the web which could split the large size file into smaller files and an executable file to join them later. The paradox was that the same software set up file was split up into 3 parts and then transferred to our home PC’s with the help of 3 floppies. Now this file splitter software and floppies were used to transfer about 12 songs from our college lab – It required 10 floppies and 15 days of dedicated effort to complete this mission.
After the introduction of CD’s they became the flavor of the season and how can we not leave our stamp on CDs. Once, our professor was struggling to read contents from a CD since the CD had many scratches over it. We took this opportunity to impress upon our professor by giving him a helping hand. One of my friend brought a container of water, took the CD from my professor’s hand and just touched the shiny surface of the CD on the surface of the water. Our prof’s BP may have reached sky high when he saw my friend immersed his important CD in water. My friend confidently wiped the water traces from the CD surface with a soft cloth and inserted the CD in the drive. The PC read the contents on the CD and our professor was left stranded with his tongue in between his lips.
Our computer lab consisted of about 35 computers where in the 2 of them were relatively new than the rest of the others. We were assigned the computers in each semester and unfortunately we were not able to get the new comps. So what we did, took the help of the Microsoft Office AutoCorrect Option (Tools>AutoCorrect Options> Replace With) and replaced ‘a’ with ‘Anand’, ‘b’ with ‘Benaam’, ‘c’ with ‘Chota Chetan’, ‘d’ with ‘Dharmatma’ etc.. So every time the user typed an alphabet, these different movie names would appear on the screen. The user complained it to the lab instructor, who after scratching his head would offer a new PC to the user. The 2 new PC’s were now without any user. The next practical’s we asked the lab instructor if we could use the new PC, he said that the PC was malfunctioning and then we said we would try using it. Without letting others know, we removed the auto correct options and then started using the new PC. We actually started breeding un-harmful virus on these PC’s so that no other user would use the PC – Infact, when we passed out, we had left about 170 virus dwelling in that PC.
We actually did a project on Machine Vision System which actually captured the image of an object and then compared the images stored in the database to find out what this object was. Here the image comparison was done by a number of algorithms and one of the algorithms was finding the edges of the image which was like drawing a sketch of the object that is placed. During one of the interim project reviews, to explain the concept of edge comparison, one of my project mates actually took a jpg image of Aishwarya Rai and found out the edges of the image and the result turned out to be a so-very-real sketch of Aishwarya Rai. This actually spurred us to upload all film-stars’ pictures and come up with sketches. All my classmates wanted their pictures to be converted into sketches (It never occurred to us then, that the same concept can be popularized and marketed until we found the same in all the multiplexes and shopping malls and charged a whopping 150 Rs for the same). In fact, this became so popular with our classmates that they believed with our project was only drawing sketches and they were pleasantly surprised at the end of the project, when we told them that our system could compare and find similar objects.
Another of those practical exams on computers was the FoxPro Lab in the 7the semester. We were asked to do a database application on the FoxPro and this application required us to ask for the option from the user and then perform tasks accordingly. I, in fact completed the database application in 1 hr and 15 minutes which meant that I had 1 hr and 45 minutes for the Viva Voce and therefore started formatting and focusing on the aesthetics of the application. However since the time left was too much, I thought, instead of the regular text menu option “Enter your choice?”, let me try option buttons (radio buttons, this was not a part of the syllabus and was not never taught) for the form and therefore I started designing a form with option buttons on it. I completed it and when the external professor asked me to show what I have accomplished in the last 3 hours, I showed him my application. He explored it and saw all the functionalities were working fine and then asked me which practical exams I had? What a strange question was that – I however calmly answered “FoxPro” and then I saw him calling our internal professor and telling him, why this student is using a different application than FoxPro to complete the database application. Our internal professor also was stunned to hear this and then he sat on my comp and verified the database application that I had prepared and said the program is OK but he asked me “Why did you not use the FoxPro for doing this database application” Listening to this, I quickly grasped what the situation was – both the professors never knew that option buttons did exist in FoxPro. Then I had to convince them that this was indeed programmed in FoxPro, also showed them the code for the program. I in fact opened the Help of the FoxPro application and showed them that option buttons can be used in FoxPro. Ufff!! It was tough explaining the 2 Profs and it was no fun to bring that enlightenment on their faces after I had completed convincing them that it was indeed FoxPro. The 2 Profs then explained me that they did know that the application was made in FoxPro all along and just wanted to pull my leg on going too far and acting too smart. Never knew, if they indeed told a truth or were just covering up their ignorance. Regardless, those 15 minutes did put in a bother. As they say, the law of averages does work and with this instance the hunter in fact almost was hunted in his own territory.
Years flew by, but I never got a chance to flaunt my PC skills, until my engineering days, when PC became a part and parcel of our syllabus. The first year we had Programming with FORTRAN – the first computer language that we learnt. It was fun to apply logic and complete those different sets of programs using arrays, procedures, functions etc. However, I still recall that dreadful morning of our first semester exams in FORTRAN programming. It was an early morning start @ 8:00 am and we were told to pull out a sheet of paper among many where in different problem statements that was to be programmed, was written. My luck deserted me when I pulled out a paper which had the toughest program of the lot (I got to know this, because only 2 of us out of the overall 50 managed to complete this). I split my hair apart, banged my head, refurbished my grey cells, yet until 10:30 am, I had no clue, how I would complete that program. I had started accepting doom, when suddenly I made my changes in the program that I had written and the program worked. I called the exam invigilator and he with a wicked smile, started verifying my program by pulling out a set of numbers that were supposed to be the worst set for the program to crash. He put in the numbers and to both our surprise, the program worked @ exactly 10:57 am. I still cannot forget the astonishment on his face. The marks in the exam did astonish me because not every practical exam would you score 96.
The finishing years of the last century coincided with the initial growth phase of the internet (at least in India). Internet – mailbox and chatting was the buzz of every town. We as budding tech-savvy engineers, then were much attracted to the e-world that we drove 6 kms and literally paid @ 120 Rs an hour to explore what is emailing and chatting. We each had email addresses which were not given to anybody else and was just used to send a hi, for a friend who was not with us at that particular moment of time. Slowly upgraded ourselves to chatting – since we had limited contact with friends out of town, we naturally resorted to mass-chatting centers. We quickly got acquainted with ASL code and also the fact that there existed an allergy among various chatters with the 19/M/India. Well, not much option was left when u hv paid 120 Rs and browsed all the websites that you know, but to resort to some pranks and so we tried a new ASL code 18/F/India and sent a buzz to my mate sitting in the adjoining cubicle and he was confused, perplexed, mystified, bewildered, excited, animated, overwhelmed and what not to get a rare request. He quickly called me into his cubicle to see what he had got (in fact he was the one who had pleaded for a separate cubicle himself, when I was insisting on a single comp, regardless of the money factor, since he wanted privacy and solace for himself – He thought finally the efforts were worth it). Chatting continued between 2 of us sitting in adjoining cubicles – Can’t recall how he got it, but he smartly caught the source of mischief. We quickly teamed up to fox a common friend with the same trick – 10 years down the lane, this smart chap still believes that the so called virtual Rakhee Deshmukh exists and she is settled in US with her hubby and a kiddo. Six of us (read Rakhee), share a common ID – write update mails to this guy, chat with him occasionally (the frequency has reduced considerably after he got married), he discusses his problems with us (read her) and believe it or not even sent him photographs!! (He also sends lot of his photos to her – In fact she is in the mailing group as us) The pinnacle of the prank was reached when he expressed his desire to meet Rakhee when he would be in Bangalore for an official work. Poor chap was left stranded waiting in a hang out place on Brigade Road (Alas, only me missed out to enjoy that scene!!)
Not too long ago, (If you are one of those who believe that a decade is a long time – ignore the header!!) 3.5” floppies ruled the show and were one of the biggest revolutions in IT industry considering that their predecessors – 5.25” & 8” floppies never fitted in a shirt pocket, plus the fact that the small disk stored more bytes. But the floppies contained only 1.44 MB, not even 1/4th of the memory space required to store a MP3 song. One of my friend desperately needed songs from the film ‘Taal’ and ‘Refugee’ on his PC and back then there were no music portals. Luckily we managed to find them stored in one of our computer labs, now how the mission was how to take the songs to his computer. Various options including zipping the file, buying a CD writer for our college lab, bringing his hard disk and taking the college hard disk homes were discussed – Luckily sanity prevailed. We managed to search out software on the web which could split the large size file into smaller files and an executable file to join them later. The paradox was that the same software set up file was split up into 3 parts and then transferred to our home PC’s with the help of 3 floppies. Now this file splitter software and floppies were used to transfer about 12 songs from our college lab – It required 10 floppies and 15 days of dedicated effort to complete this mission.
After the introduction of CD’s they became the flavor of the season and how can we not leave our stamp on CDs. Once, our professor was struggling to read contents from a CD since the CD had many scratches over it. We took this opportunity to impress upon our professor by giving him a helping hand. One of my friend brought a container of water, took the CD from my professor’s hand and just touched the shiny surface of the CD on the surface of the water. Our prof’s BP may have reached sky high when he saw my friend immersed his important CD in water. My friend confidently wiped the water traces from the CD surface with a soft cloth and inserted the CD in the drive. The PC read the contents on the CD and our professor was left stranded with his tongue in between his lips.
Our computer lab consisted of about 35 computers where in the 2 of them were relatively new than the rest of the others. We were assigned the computers in each semester and unfortunately we were not able to get the new comps. So what we did, took the help of the Microsoft Office AutoCorrect Option (Tools>AutoCorrect Options> Replace With) and replaced ‘a’ with ‘Anand’, ‘b’ with ‘Benaam’, ‘c’ with ‘Chota Chetan’, ‘d’ with ‘Dharmatma’ etc.. So every time the user typed an alphabet, these different movie names would appear on the screen. The user complained it to the lab instructor, who after scratching his head would offer a new PC to the user. The 2 new PC’s were now without any user. The next practical’s we asked the lab instructor if we could use the new PC, he said that the PC was malfunctioning and then we said we would try using it. Without letting others know, we removed the auto correct options and then started using the new PC. We actually started breeding un-harmful virus on these PC’s so that no other user would use the PC – Infact, when we passed out, we had left about 170 virus dwelling in that PC.
We actually did a project on Machine Vision System which actually captured the image of an object and then compared the images stored in the database to find out what this object was. Here the image comparison was done by a number of algorithms and one of the algorithms was finding the edges of the image which was like drawing a sketch of the object that is placed. During one of the interim project reviews, to explain the concept of edge comparison, one of my project mates actually took a jpg image of Aishwarya Rai and found out the edges of the image and the result turned out to be a so-very-real sketch of Aishwarya Rai. This actually spurred us to upload all film-stars’ pictures and come up with sketches. All my classmates wanted their pictures to be converted into sketches (It never occurred to us then, that the same concept can be popularized and marketed until we found the same in all the multiplexes and shopping malls and charged a whopping 150 Rs for the same). In fact, this became so popular with our classmates that they believed with our project was only drawing sketches and they were pleasantly surprised at the end of the project, when we told them that our system could compare and find similar objects.
Another of those practical exams on computers was the FoxPro Lab in the 7the semester. We were asked to do a database application on the FoxPro and this application required us to ask for the option from the user and then perform tasks accordingly. I, in fact completed the database application in 1 hr and 15 minutes which meant that I had 1 hr and 45 minutes for the Viva Voce and therefore started formatting and focusing on the aesthetics of the application. However since the time left was too much, I thought, instead of the regular text menu option “Enter your choice?”, let me try option buttons (radio buttons, this was not a part of the syllabus and was not never taught) for the form and therefore I started designing a form with option buttons on it. I completed it and when the external professor asked me to show what I have accomplished in the last 3 hours, I showed him my application. He explored it and saw all the functionalities were working fine and then asked me which practical exams I had? What a strange question was that – I however calmly answered “FoxPro” and then I saw him calling our internal professor and telling him, why this student is using a different application than FoxPro to complete the database application. Our internal professor also was stunned to hear this and then he sat on my comp and verified the database application that I had prepared and said the program is OK but he asked me “Why did you not use the FoxPro for doing this database application” Listening to this, I quickly grasped what the situation was – both the professors never knew that option buttons did exist in FoxPro. Then I had to convince them that this was indeed programmed in FoxPro, also showed them the code for the program. I in fact opened the Help of the FoxPro application and showed them that option buttons can be used in FoxPro. Ufff!! It was tough explaining the 2 Profs and it was no fun to bring that enlightenment on their faces after I had completed convincing them that it was indeed FoxPro. The 2 Profs then explained me that they did know that the application was made in FoxPro all along and just wanted to pull my leg on going too far and acting too smart. Never knew, if they indeed told a truth or were just covering up their ignorance. Regardless, those 15 minutes did put in a bother. As they say, the law of averages does work and with this instance the hunter in fact almost was hunted in his own territory.
4 comments:
well I guess u were lucky to get through Fortran I had the same fateful program of 50 odd lines which only i had bihearted but lost the entire program due to the fact i forgto a "," in the 2nd line. From then on till date i never understood what programming was.. Lost a paper though cause of same.. but.. i guess it makes no difference.. :))
Abhijit, I saw your blog and liked what I saw. You have the gift of story telling. And your choice of visuals and expressions is outstanding (my perspective)
Abhijit, Saw and njoyed ur blog. You have a nick of telling the story in a typical understandable way. Continue blogging.
Abhijit, Saw and njoyed ur blog. You have a nick of telling the story in a typical understandable way. Continue blogging.
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