A special anniversary

I realised late last evening that today is a special day. January the 19th is my Computer Birthday. It is six years today since I got my first PC. Prior to that I knew nothing of computers. Really, nothing. I’d only used them at university to surf the then-youthful internet and that was with the aid of my computer scientist house mates and on machines which ran X Windows – a UNIX variant I believe – rather than Microsoft’s Windows 3.1 or NT. I wrote assignments by hand, I had no idea what the massively hyped “Windows 95” was when I saw hundreds of display boxes in West Orchards’ branch of Game. That’s the shopping centre in the middle of Coventry btw. I’m adding local colour. Most of it concrete grey but I’m adding it anyway. So I came to the world of computing as a virgin but, like most virgins, eager to get stuck in as quickly as possible.

I went for a Tiny computer – an impressive Pentium I processor, 200mhz with 32 megs of RAM. It was the best they had and it set me back fifteen hundred quid. The last of the money that the Halifax building society kindly gave me when I didn’t single handedly stop them demutualising. Rather unfortunately, my timing was off and it arrived on the 19th of January – the very day I was starting my first Job Centre enforced “Restart” course. I was dole scum in those days and such courses would plague my life from time to time. It meant I was going out of the door to catch a train just as the nice man from Tiny was piling huge boxes in my bedroom. Oh! The agony. Stuff to play with at home and I was stuck in a classroom being taught how to shake hands and give a good impression. Or something – I wasn’t really listening.

I remember setting it up while watching the tape of the previous night’s WWF Royal Rumble pay per view. That was the night Kane put the Undertaker in a casket and then set fire to it in one of their more spectacular match endings. That was the same casket which, moments earlier, broke Shawn Michaels’ back and put him on the shelf for four and a half years. This show is etched in my mind in connection with the computer because I remember experimenting with the microphone and recording bits of the commentary and playing them back through my new speakers. So aside from various Windows noises, the first sounds my computer made were probably Jim Ross shouting and screaming about a man being burned alive.

I’m almost entirely self taught where computers are concerned. Even the IT courses I’ve been on were me learning by playing with software I didn’t have at home rather than someone telling me how to do things. I asked questions of course and they answered them but that’s about the extent of their involvement. From the first time I switched it on I felt that I liked computers. I felt a confidence to just throw myself in and play around with them and see what happened. A lot of people are nervous around them. They think they will do something wrong and break it. Herein lies a paradox about computers – they go wrong regularly but it is very hard to actually make them go wrong. It’s like the human body – people die of the strangest things every day but suicide is so damn tricky to achieve. So I played with Microsoft Works, Encarta, Windows itself, bits and bobs from computer magazines (that was the beginning of a massive PC mag buying programme which netted hundreds of cover CDs which I’ve only recently bothered to get out and throw away. “I might need them one day” cuts little ice when (a) they’re Windows 95 programmes which probably wouldn’t work in XP anyway and more importantly (b) I use a Mac most of the time anyway.)

I sold that old PC to my father when I upgraded to the machine I still use to update the website (not having the luxury of FrontPage for the Mac since it doesn’t exist, the bastards). He never really used it though. He’s not like me – he’s one of the timid ones. He uses his new laptop more (having paid proper money for it) and even though I tell him he can tap the track-pad twice to replicate a double mouse click he never listens. He opens folders and applications by left clicking once to select, right clicking once to bring up the menu, moving the cursor to Open and left clicking that once. Bless him.

So on 19th January 1998 I got the computer I’d wanted for years. Four months to the day after my dream of Sky television in my bedroom was achieved thanks to Cable and Wireless canvassing our area and getting father on a bad day – he’d just been told by Sky that they were increasing their subscription and he was annoyed with them. It’s odd then that exactly half way between the two was the first time my parents caught me in the act of cutting my arm with a knife and dragging me to the doctor’s. It was a queer day – it ended with me embarrassing myself in front of Harry Enfield. True story.

It was probably the most important single purchase of my still young life. If I hadn't taken the plunge then, this website may not exist now. Who can say? In a universe of infinite possibilities someone else might be running this site and doing so with better spelling, grammar and use of colour. But in this universe it's me and it's thanks to six years of arsing around that it's here.

19th January 2004