My Computing world

I was brought up in the pre-PC era.

It was 1979, one of buddy whose brother was a sales person attached to Sime Darby. At that point, Sime Darby is the distributor for Apple products, naturally, he bought one for himself.

It was an Apple II plus with 48K RAM, and dual 5 1/4 inch floppy drives, and of course a green monitor.

I used to visit my buddy during weekends, and his brother is generous to allow me to use his brand new Apple II plus.

Without coaching, no tips, except for manual in English. (I am a Chinese school boy, and I speak no English, write no English, and read no English, rather, English is alien to me).

My buddy is more an outdoor type, in most cases, I was hiding in his brother's room, and he joined my other friends outside his house playing all sorts of games.

From there on, I learned computing the hardest way. I was dealing with a complete unknown piece of equipment with language I cannot even understand.

Well, I got through when I poke around, refer back to the manuals provided, and slowly I was able to start writing some simple BASIC programs.

I showed my buddy, but he wasn't too keen on what I have done, instead he was more in tuned with outdoor activities.

I was then a consistent weekend visitor of his, every week I learned something.

My uncle bought a clone Apple II plus about 2 years later, and I was using quite a lot of stuff, including getting my homework done on computer where teachers always warned me that I should hand written my homework else I would not be able to write during my SPM. However, some of my teachers showed keen interest on the way I did my homework.

At the same time, my school was starting up a computer club, it was inspired by Mr. Tan, our Mathematics teacher who owned a Commodore VIC-20 besides Apple II clone.

Mr Tan guided the club members, free of charge, what the computer can do for us. I do not recall if there anyone who are keen on the subject except me. I went to his house a couple of time looking at his set up.

He was the one who introduced modem to me. showed me what the modem can do. Although he can only communicate with his other friend in KL who has the same modem, and long distance call is expensive.

During that time, one of my uncle, who was studying in London, sent me a Sinclair ZX81.

Well, I was kind of sleeping with this little "door-stopper", look like one, isn't it?

Since this little guy needs to connect to a TV, I have to wait until everyone in the family go sleep, and I sneaked up late at night just to play around with this little wonder.

The first proper programming book I ever had, fresh from UK at that time, titled "Byteing Deeper into your ZX81"

Since 1980, I started to read "BYTE" magazine, a magazine which is my only source of computing knowledge, and was hard to get. I need to save some money each month, and went to book store often to book a copy.