Image Credits: Google Images under Creative Commons License
Last Week, I read a truly wonderful article
on Vincent
Van Gogh who was a legendary painting genius of his times. What made a
deep impression on my mind was his opinion on Love, “Love is an intense emotion
that can propel a man to carry out extraordinary tasks and overcome huge
challenges. It also brings the best out of man not only in terms of his
handwork but also brings to the front the best of his artistic and creative
capabilities.”
I believed this was indeed very true as I was aware that some
of the greatest works of art and literature in the world were inspired and
propelled by Love.
I am essentially a non-creative person by birth and am indeed a big Zero in subjects
like Art and Craft or Painting and Drawing. After I read that article on Van Gogh
about Love transforming a plain, simple and ordinary man to a creative and
artistic person, I started wondering if such a thing ever happened in my life
as well. I could not remember myself falling in Love ever in the last 20 years
of my life nor could I could recollect any endeavor of mine over 20 years that can be even remotely called as creative or artistic. Besides no one
ever complimented me even once about my tastes or choices in areas related to art or creativity. I tried thinking a little harder and further
re-winded by a year.
My
mind then came to a screeching halt at the “Summer of 1994”, exactly 21 years
into the past...
Instantly an image of a pretty, elegant and
graceful girl came to my mind and it occurred to me that it was that of a girl on
whom I had a massive crush in the “Summer
of 1994”. The next recollection was that of the ‘most creative and artistic piece of work’ that I had ever done in my
life. I truly believed that it was a masterpiece of art that was both wonderful
and marvelous at the same time. Probably a work of such high excellence that no
one in my college at that time would have even dared to dream or envisage. The masterpiece of art was a “BIRTHDAY GREETING CARD” for the
creation of which I had worked hard incessantly for 30 days during my summer
vacation.
It was her birthday in a month’s time from
then… And I started making plans on how to impress her on that special day. I
was extremely poor when it came to
understanding the psyche of girls at that time and I had no idea at all as
to how to go about impressing her. I
racked my brains for two full days and all I could think of was to give her a ‘hand
made’ birthday card. I then realized that my nearest competitors would buy her a
nice gift like a teddy bear or at the minimum a top of the line greeting card
which would be 2 feet tall and 1 feet wide and came with a lot of multi-colored
designs and pre-printed with very sweet and mushy words. I intended to beat the
competition hands down. I planned to surprise her by giving both a ‘lovely pink colored teddy bear with a red
ribbon around its neck as well as a jumbo greeting card’ such as the one I
described above. I went to the biggest Archie's Gallery in Hyderabad and
narrowed down on the two items that I wanted after spending 2 hours of
deliberations as to what color combinations and fonts or background text would
impress her the most. I checked with the guy at the billing counter about the
total price. The number he told me made my head spin for a moment and I became grumpy and started criticizing the
Prime Minister for high inflation in India over the last 5 years of his
rule.
I went back home and decided to ask my father
for the money to buy the gift. There were two issues though:
Issue
1: I had never lied to my
father till that day and did not want to lie even then. At the same time I could
not tell him the real reason as to why I needed the money.
Issue
2: Assuming I convinced my
father by giving some fake reason, the bigger problem was about where I would
store the gifts till her birthday. I could keep them at a friend’s place but
then this was meant to be a ‘top secret’ operation not even to be told to the
closest friend. I could also hide them in my bedroom but it would be impossible
to escape the prying and sharp eyes of my younger sister. I knew what a big
disaster would happen if she discovered those gifts in my room.
After all these deliberations I was again back
to square one. I decided that a hand made birthday card was the best option under
the constraints I had and thus sadly froze on that option so that I could the start
the actual job of making the greeting card. I started with a few A4 size sheets
and a box of sketches. I did come out with 2-3 variants of finished greetings
by the end of the day. They were not that great but knowing my artistic abilities,
I had to be content that it was as best I could get to. I relaxed for a few
hours and then my eyes fell on the PC in my room that I had rented for a month with an intent to practice
some advanced algorithmic implementations using complex data structures.
Remember those were the summer days of 1994 and there was no Windows operating
system available to me in Hyderabad. My PC which was supposed to be a top end
machine with “color monitor” and running MS DOS 4.0 which was the latest OS at
that time. Was I thrilled? I would admire
the beauty of my PC atleast three times a day and would feel very proud about
its processing speeds and memory.
I then had a brain wave, I felt that to be able to beat my competition hands
down, I must leverage the power of technology. Technology was the in thing
in those days and applying it for real life applications and that too using a
custom designed program would be considered super cool and I was sure that my
girl would be completely bowled over by my intelligence and creativity. The
idea was to write a simple C program using “printf()”
functions that would print out a nice message for her on the computer screen
and then I would take a print out of the screen content and hand over the print
out to her on the special day. Remember those were not the “Windows Graphical
User Interface” days and all I had was a MS DOS machine at my home or even in
the college for that matter which was completely text or character based and
worked in command prompt mode. I did write a beautiful program to print out a
nice message for her and also used basic MS DOS tricks to make a beautiful border
for the message as well. I loved using a lot of color combinations for words and sentences while writing in those days using sketches. I also used the
same style and ensured that the heading and other lines in the message are of different colors. When I executed the program it worked beautifully and
the screen was full of messages displayed in multicolored words. I then fired a
print out on the dot matrix printer available in the college lab. The print out was OK but I realized that the
printer works only in black and white mode and there was no way to get color
print outs. I hid the print out in my bag so that no one would come to know of
it (remember it was a top secret operation) and took it out only once I reached
home and locked myself in my room.
I intently looked at the print out examining
every fine detail. It finally boiled down to 6 lines of text one after another
and all the characters were of same size in black color. The printer being a
dot matrix one could only produce characters made of dots and the resolution
was not good. I still thought that I would be far ahead of the competition as I
had used a custom C program “written by me especially for her”.
That evening I was sitting with my father and
chatting about some movie. Next to him were a bunch of papers neatly typed and
the print looked awesome. They did not have computers in his office at that
time and he told me that they were from an electronic type writer whose print
quality and character clarity was awesome though it was all in black ink. There
were a few other papers that he said were from an old 1980s Remington
typewriter and even that look dark, bold and clear when printed on a bond paper. I took one of the sheets as a sample from him and went into my
room to compare it with my precious print out that leveraged the state of the
art technology of that time. Besides it was a custom program that I had
written!!! The print out from a 1980s Remington type writer on a A4 bond paper
looked 100 times better than that of my sophisticated dot matrix print out on a third
grade quality computer line feed paper.
I came to my senses very soon and decided to
drop the technology based option and revert to the original plan of giving a
hand crafted greeting card. Atleast, I thought she would be able to appreciate
all the hard work that I had to put in despite my very limited creative
capabilities All said and done I was able to finally produce a reasonably good
quality greeting card. Besides I had
used multiple colored sketches including one colour that was called as ‘fluorescent’
in those days. A sense of pride and success filled my heart
and the warmth spread all over my body.
It was indeed a proud moment for me.
The next day one of my sister’s friends came
home and showed me a greeting card that she had made for her brother’s birthday
using simple colour pencils. It was indeed awesome. My sister was 5 years
younger to me. I would typically dismiss away my sister and her friends calling
them little kids and would ask them to go and play in the verandah. When I
asked her friend if she was the best painter in her school, she said that this
was nothing at all and they were some girls and boys from senior classes who
could make awesome paintings which looked like colour photographs. And they did
not even have the fluorescent colors that I was so proud of!!!
I knew that I could not make a better card than
what I had already made and truly believed that my
girl would certainly be impressed by the fact that I had toiled hard to make
the card while my competitors had just bought ready made cards and gifts
from Archie's (although expensive ones).
The next day I went to a friend’s place. He was
rich dad’s son and had a cool computer with expensive and
coolest accessories like a joy stick fitted to the CPU and 4-5 latest games pre-loaded
on his PC. It came with a top of the range high resolution colour monitor as
well. He showed me a game and what I saw swept me off my feet. It was a simple
game based on MS DOS operating system, compared to what we have these days but
what struck me as a wonder then was the beautiful backgrounds in multiple
colors that kept changing and the fonts were also in different colors and in various
formats and sizes. And to top it all, it had an awesome background music though
it was a very simple tune in varying pitches and sounding melodious. I had
never seen anything like this before. I had certainly seen some older versions
of games in college that worked on MS DOS machines but this was a whole new
experience. I asked him how one could make these games with all the colorful graphics,
awesome animations and sounds and displaying multi colored and varied sized
text characters and that too in 2 different fonts which look like cursive
writing. He had absolutely no clue what so ever. I tried asking him using all
possible ways but he really did not know except for the fact that his cousin
sent him Games Floppy Disk from the US.
I went back home and was really restless as to
how does one make a program that runs the way as the game program at my
friend's place. I was in third year engineering then and had done quite some
complex programming on various languages and platforms. They were very complex
algorithms and needed intense processing and deep systems programming but the
output of all those was only in text or character mode. At that time I truly
believed that I could write a program for any functionality using C or C++ and could
make the computer do all that is possible to be done by it and can get the correct
results or output. I was then young with hot blood and for some reason had a
killer confidence about my grasp of computer science. The fact that I could not
figure out how the animation and graphics were being programmed, what was the
programming language used and what code using what algorithms needs to be
written, really put me in a complete discomfort zone! I had now lost my
confidence completely on my so called ability to do any thing on a computer by
writing a program for the same.
We did not have access to internet in those
days and hence there was no Google as well. The only way to get information on
any topic was to buy a book on that topic. On these advanced computer science
topics it was not very easy to get the latest editions of books in India. Even
if an imported book was available it would be extremely expensive in rupee
terms.
I spent a day quickly trying to visualize in my
mind the logical blocks of functionality that I had seen in that awesome game
in my friends house and based on my overall knowledge about computer science
that I had so far picked up, I was able to clearly put logical and functional
blocks needed for developing that functionality (including hardware and
software). That gave me some confidence that I atleast now knew what I need to
learn or areas and subjects that I need to dig more deeply to build the
functionality.
The next day morning one of my friends called
me and I woke up with a start. After some chitchat he asked me if I knew that
it was that pretty girl’s birthday next month. I was taken aback, immediately
went into ‘alert mode’ and replied that I do not know that girl all that well
and I do not know or care when her birthday was. I then tried to get some
details as to why he had to wake me up in the morning and talk about that
pretty girl. He confessed that he was in love with her and he was planning an
innovative present for her birthday. At that moment, my heart literally sank. I
remained silent. My friend went on to say that he wanted to show the present to
me first and take my opinion on it. He also added that he had a lot of respect
for my judgement and taste. I told him that I will come over to his house that
evening and hung up the phone.
My birthday card was anyway ready and I was
also sure that this friend of mine would have bought an expensive teddy bear
and that it could not compete with my handcrafted and custom designed card which
also had words written in ‘fluorescent’!!!
I casually went to his house that evening and
the idea was to appreciate his choice of gift, wish him good luck for his Love
and then return home. I planned to be a perfect gentleman that day and not get jealous
about the fact that I now had an extra competitor. When he showed me his present, I was dumb
founded. It was an awesome painting in oil colors on an A4 size paper with a
very scenic background of a mountain valley with a river flowing thru it. And
our pretty girl was seen sitting peacefully on the river bank exuding natural
beauty and pure grace in a traditional Kashmiri dress. I gazed intently at the
painting for a few minutes and this time honestly and genuinely complimented
him on his talent. When I wished him good luck, he talked about competition. I
philosophically replied that competition exists in all walks of life and the
best man will finally win. However I did
not mention even a word about my interest in that pretty girl.
I went back home and I just thought about my
pretty girl and looked at the chances of winning over her vis. a vis. the rest of
my competitors. I knew my strengths well (or atleast I thought so) and at that
point in time I had certain clear convictions on what would impress a girl. I
believed the following attributes would play a role in the evaluation criteria
from a girl’s perspective: good family background, reasonably good looks, engineering
branch (as it impacts job potential), good academics (as it is indicative of
future performance), good nature, nice manners and ability to make an
interesting conversation. All that
unnecessary worry about the gift and trying to impress her on the basis of the
gift was not all that big a thing at all. A
girl does not marry a boy just because he gave her a great gift. However it does create a nice starting impression if
a thoughtful gift is given on her birthday and it does not really matter
whether it is expensive or not.
Having resolved the conflict in my mind and
having regained confidence, I felt much lighter as I thought I was the most
suitable boy based on all the parameters mentioned in the criteria above. And I
concluded that competition was no match for me on any count.
My thoughts returned to the impressive computer
Game that I saw at my friend’s house a few days ago. I recalled that my friend’s
brother had sent him the game in a floppy. A brainwave struck me instantly that
if I write an impressive graphics program for her birthday, put the executable
in a floppy and hand it over to her to run it on any PC based on her
convenience, it would be the best and most thoughtful gift that one could give
her. It would also be probably the most ‘technologically savvy’ gift a boy
would have ever given to a girl till date atleast in our college. And it would
not cost me a thing as the only thing needed was the hard-work for programming.
I then sat down with my drawing board and listed
down the activities to be performed. I first needed to get the content ready as
irrespective of the technology used it is the content that is most important. I
took sheets of A4 paper and put a wireframe of the messages that I wanted to clearly
convey to her. I decided that there will be 5 sections in my overall message
which need to be shown in a logical sequence or order. I designed the rough
high-level layout of each section on a separate paper thus ending with a set of
5 papers at the completion of the endeavor. I spent a lot of time reflecting on her
personality, her likes and dislikes, what would she want to know about me, what
aspects of my character or traits of me should I lay an emphasis on, how do I
succinctly talk about my core values and ideals, what is more important to her
and what is less important to her and so on….
I stepped
into her shoes completely and reflected deeply for long hours and tried to
visualize as to what exact content and choice of words would sweep her off?
I tried to figure out her mindset and once I got some clarity, I tried thinking
the way she thinks on all of the aspects and questions that I mentioned before.
After 2-3 days of deep reflection and pondering
over again and again multiple times, I finally was able to exactly figure out
what the theme of each of the 5 sections should be and also put the sentences
and words under each of the 5 sections to the best of my satisfaction. I am not creative at all and I am a big zero
on arts and painting. However in those days I was confident about appropriately
expressing what I want to using a pen and a paper. At this point I firmly
believed that the content and the actual
message is far more important than some fancy bells and whistles using graphics
and sound.
After struggling till late nights on trying to
experiment with graphics and animations, I could not make much progress. After
a lot of deliberation and comparing different programming languages, I settled
down with Turbo C/C++ Environment which not only made advanced systems programming
using C needed to access sound cards, video cards and other hardware possible
but also boasted of an efficient C++
based graphics library that was compatible with MS DOS. I also bought books on
topics such as Advanced C++ Object programming, Advanced Systems Programming
and Computer Graphics Algorithms (actually prescribed for final year Computer
Engineering) and spent late nights reading them and trying to grasp them. I
felt that I did understand the concepts quite well but when I converted them into
an algorithm and then to C++ code, a lot of unexpected behavior started
happening and system had to be re-booted multiple times. Systems Programming is
quite complex compared to the usual programming as we operate at a level very
close to the hardware and actually invoke the OS kernel or device driver functions
directly from our code.
After my initial failures I realized that this
would take a lot more time than what I had ever imagined. 2 weeks had already passed
by and not much visible progress was seen on the graphics, animation and sound
related functionality. I did have some success with the sounds but I had no
knowledge of music to be able to combine sounds of different frequencies to
form a full octave. However I was able to play small bits of melodious sounds
each lasting 2 seconds. My idea was to be able to play the first 2 lines of ‘happy
birthday to you’ tune on the computer….But this looked to be a remote event….
As I had only 2 more weeks left, I changed the
strategy slightly, I decided that as a first step I will create a pure text or
character mode based program which displays the content of the 5 sections, one
after the other. I could also use a nice background and font colours to make
each of the 5 sections look unique and have a nice blend of contrasting or
matching combination of colours. There will be no graphics or sound used at all
and it would be purely text or character mode. It is a simple screen by screen display of 5
sections with changing colours one after the other….I knew this is not really
any great or advanced technology but then it was certainly innovative. And all
I need to do is give her a floppy with the executable program loaded and she
has to just insert the floppy into the A drive, change the system command
prompt to A: > and then type the program
name at command prompt and press enter. Then the first screen comes up with the
desired colour combination and the characters are displayed on the screen with desired
text justified to the middle of the screen. It says “press any key to continue”
at the bottom of the screen below the text. She then presses a key and then the second
screen shows up and so on for all five screens.
Since I had the content ready, it took me less
than a day to program the above functionality and get it working. However I
then wanted the background and font colours on each of the screens to align to
her tastes and likes and also suit the theme being displayed on the screen. I
wanted to use the colour combinations that she would love seeing and use the
correct blend of colours that would be very impactful, appealing and pleasing
to her eyes at the same time. I spent another full day in working with the
colour combinations and all types of blends in a trial and error mode. I kept
working on this till late night till I
was fully satisfied that she would indeed love the colour combinations used and
probably would be even delighted at the way they have been blended.
Now I had the Plan B ready and all set to be
handed over. I got a brand new 1.44 MB floppy diskette, formatted it and
installed the latest OS and copied the executable of my ‘birthday program’
titled ABC.exe to the floppy. I also took care to ensure that the Floppy LABEL
after formatting was given her first name so that when floppy is loaded, her
name would be shown instead of some default floppy name displaying on the
screen…I thought small things like this
would add to the thrill of the overall experience….
Now I was more relaxed as the Plan B was ready
and it was actually in quite good shape….And I started my intense R&D again
on the graphics and animation side of things. After struggling for hours at a
stretch, I figured out that I had difficulty in implementing ‘free curve’ based
images but could implement geometrical shapes such as polygons and ellipses or
circles and lines. This was good enough for me as I was any way not good at
drawing free curves even on paper and there was no way I could make sense with
them on a computer screen. Graphics in those days involved writing our own
algorithms and code for lighting up every pixel on the screen. You need to know
what colour every pixel on the screen is going to be finally to give the needed
background design and colored text in the front.
The background used in Plan B was a simple plain
screen of a specified colour. There was no background pattern or design to it.
I started working first on the background design of each of the five screens
and finally came out with 5 unique backgrounds each having different patterns
or designs based on geometric shapes. This needed me to draw each of the background
designs first on paper, then figuring out what pixels are to be of what colour
to create the pattern or design drawn on paper and then lighting up the pixels
on the screen. It was quite a painful task to create these colorful pattern
base backgrounds as I needed to work at pixel level but not as difficult as one
might imagine as we have the wonderful invention called FOR LOOP.
For(i=1; i++; i
> 10000;)
FillPixel( i, colour=CYAN );
The
above statement lights up 10000 pixels to CYAN colour at one stroke….
And needless to say I carried out multiple iterations
of tweaks and changes to the background patterns or shapes or designs and the
colours used for each element or object in the background all the time keeping
in view the exact colours which would delight her and the the patterns of
designs and their colour combinations or blending of colours which would thrill my girl and be very appealing and
pleasant and at the same time impactful to her eyes.
Once the 5 backgrounds were done to my best
satisfaction or what I thought would really thrill her. I had to always try to
get into her shoes and attempt to think
with her mind to envisage what she would like and what she would not and what
would delight her the most. The next step was about the characters to be
displayed on each of the 5 screens. The simplest way would be to use simple
text based characters as I had done in Plan B, but I believed to really delight
my girl the way I was delighted when I saw the huge cursive characters on that
computer game at my friends place, I should doing similar kind of stuff. I
initially tried drawing the characters pixel by pixel so that they appear in
big font and in cursive style but it was looking very shabby and ugly. I then did some deep research and figured out
that MS DOS supported 3 types of fonts: Arial,
TimesNewRoman and MS Sans Serif. After burning some more midnight oil, and
writing a couple of hundred lines of code, I was finally able to render
characters of all these fonts exactly at the size I thought my girl would like
and the colour that she would like. Finally after many fussy trials and altering the code multiple times to get the
exact shade and tinge of the colour or
adjusting the contrast or matching to the correct RGB levels that would probably exactly match my
girls liking, I finally froze the background and text on the 5 screens. All
this had probably taken a few thousands of lines of code...
All 5 screens were now ready with great
backgrounds and fabulous text of varying font types and sizes and colours on
different screens. I thought a set of 5 screens; each one with a distinct theme
indicated by a heading and 4-5 well spaced and succinct sentences following it
with big enough font size and all justified to the center of the screen. Added
to this was the splendid background colour combinations and patterns. It was in
really good shape now…. I ran and re-ran the program multiple times to see the
over all effect it made. I did not like that “press any key to continue…” at the end of each screen to go to the
next screen. I replaced that with a timer and pause functionality which
automatically moves to the next screen after a set time. I had to keep in mind
her probable reading speed with good comfort while determining the time needed
to pause...By the way this timer functionality and move to next screen actually
needed code to be written and in those days it was not possible to just set parameters
and get work done.
All looked fine now but when I started thinking
as to how I can further improve the look and feel and ease of use, I remembered
that adding some simple animations would be more attractive and enhance the
appeal like it did in that Game at my friends house several weeks ago. I
created 2 transition effects similar to what we have today such as zoom in or
zoom out or dissolve. That also required writing of code and the pixels
actually had to be actually moved in a certain direction simultaneously for the
effect to be realized. I initially
thought that I should have a different transition effect for each of the 5
screens. It would have needed additional programming but I was more constrained
by lack of creativity in terms of being able to create additional effects. So I
just used these 2 transition effects alternately for the 5 screens.
I ran the program again and again
for a few more times. All was OK, but I somehow felt that when a screen was
displayed all the 4-5 lines on that screen appear all at once and could
possibly divert the attention of my girl.
I then wrote a bunch of code that would display one line, pause, then display
the second line, pause and so on…..I was very
mindful of her reading speed with comfort even while setting the pause
time…
Now the final run of the program….I
intently watched every minute detail including spacing, position on the screen,
the pausing time, transition effects, overall look and feel at screen level
and at the entire program level and so
on…..All looked good now and it appeared as if it was all set to launch….
At this point I suddenly remembered
the ‘happy birthday to you’ tune. I
actually felt that I should now just forget it as it was getting too late and only
4 days were left. But I felt she would be really thrilled with the ‘happy
birthday’ tune being played…. I had mentioned earlier that I could not compose
the tune using C or C++. However I tried the same using BASIC programming
language and it worked. Now the issue
was how to connect these two programs. I tried using System.Exec ( ) system call in C++ code to invoke the BASIC program
but it was abruptly terminating. This was the popular method of invoking an
executable file from within another executable as per the books I had purchased
and it just refused to work. I really got frustrated and almost gave up.
However my intent to do a perfect job
from an end to end perspective got stronger in the last few days and I wanted my girl to have a seamless and complete experience which will
leave her delighted and very pleased on all aspects. I figured out an old
hack in MS DOS wherein both .exe files are invoked serially from a .bat file
one after the other. The hack worked and I
was indeed very proud of my accomplishments.
Now it was time was a strategic
decision to be made. I had to now take a call on signing my name at the end of
the last screen. It was usual to add
FROM in any greeting card. But I was sure that my girl would be using the
college lab for running the program and I did not want anyone around to know
that it was from me. Immediately I got
on to ‘STEALTH MODE’ and decided not to add my name anywhere in the greeting.
And finally the last strategic decision: I had designed the program to prompt
for password when it starts up so that it cannot be accessed by general public.
I now decided that the password will be DEEPAK. Atleast there would be some association to my name when she
runs the program. There was certainly a
romantic air about her typing MY name on the computer….
Time flew without my realising it as
I was deeply involved in the design of the program and was trying to ensure it
works as perfectly and seamlessly as possible. Her birthday was just the ‘day
after tomorrow’ and there was no time left for dry run in college environment.
That day I stayed back after college and started the dry run in the lab. I was indeed shocked at the results. Since it
was a graphics intense program, the screen layout in some cases fit the screen
exactly or occupied only a part of the screen or exceeded the screen size. I
tried executing the program on different computers and the behaviour would be
different depending on the computer. I was completely upset seeing this
behaviour and it appeared as if all my work had gone down the drain. I then
started looking at the OS logs and realised that the problem was due to the
graphics adapter in the computer. There were different types of graphics
adapters in those days if I remember: VGA, EVGA, SVGA or something like that.
Since MS DOS was not a graphics based operating system the code for handling of
the adapter types and invoking the appropriate device driver for each adapter
had to be written in my program. This is not needed in Windows as the handling
is done automatically by the OS. Anyway luckily I could solve this problem by
writing code using a CASE statement for handling the different adapter types.
It took around an hour to write code and 2 hours to test this code on different
machine types and all was well now.
I went back home fully happy and then
after dinner ran a final dry run of the program. All went fine with the program
except that when the program execution was completed, the PASSWORD which was
DEEPAK still continued to remain displayed on the Command prompt. My strategic
decision to work in ‘STEALTH MODE’ would have bombed if I had not noticed it. I
immediately made code changes to display ****** but the scanf() function in C and C++ which is invoked to get user input is
very primitive and it took a great deal of effort to be able to achieve what I
wanted. Further runs and everything was very smooth.
I have to mention here that my girl
was rather dumb when it came to handling a computer and probably had never
written a single line of code or ever typed a single command on the MS DOS
command prompt in her life. My earlier idea of giving the floppy to her, asking
her to change the drive to A:> and then type the executable name at the
command prompt and then pressing ENTER appeared very cumbersome from her perspective.
And I thought she will not be able to run the program and all my effort would
have been in vain. I was not even sure if she knew which was A:> and which
was B:> which further added to my woes.
With just one day between that day
and D Day, I had to do something radical and out of the box so that it makes
her job very easy. I did come with up something very neat and simple solution that
night. I converted my floppy diskette to BOOTABLE
mode running the SYS A: command on MS
DOS command prompt. And then I created
an AUTOEXEC.BAT file to refer to the executables
of my birthday greeting program. And I was all set…..
The next day I ran the program
nearly 20 times on different machines with different types of graphics
adapters. All was smooth and perfect and
all set to be launched. I was actually euphoric as I had turned around the
situation completely and was able to make the program do everything I wanted.
However I realised at home that night that all my focus in the last few weeks
was only on handling technology related aspects and I did not even remember
completely what the content in the 5 screens was. I quickly ran the program at
my home PC and carefully focussed on the sentences and each of the words. I
then reflected if she might not like or feel
uncomfortable with any of the words used. After mulling over for some time,
I found everything to be perfect….
The D Day finally came and I was all
set with my most precious Amkette 1.44 MB Floppy Diskette safely ensconced in
my shirt pocket. I did not meet my girl in the morning as I knew there would be
many fans around her offering their wishes or presents. And I always liked
being very discreet in such matters. I met her at the beginning of lunch break,
quickly wished her ‘Happy Birthday’ and then pulled out my most precious Floppy
Disk from my shirt pocket and handed it over to her.
I told her to do the following:
2.
Insert the Floppy into any drive
The computer will then boot up and welcome
you by your name and ask for the password.
Type in DEEPAK and then “Watch the show…..”.
I then added, “Choose a PC with a colour monitor for best
effects….”
Saying so, I left her there still
wondering what that Floppy Diskette was all about!!!!
That evening when I reached home, my
father reminded me that the lease period of 30 days for the PC would end the
next day. I replied, “No problems at all. I have no further need for it….”
Six months had passed by….
I was in the Computer Engineering
class listening intently to my professor talking about the “Design of the Operating System”. She was
an authority on that subject and explained the concepts of multi-programming,
multi-processing, multi-tasking, multi-threading and time slicing in great
amount of detail. I suddenly felt a jolt and then experienced a “Eureka” moment as I had just figured out
why I had issues in running BASIC and C++ programs together on that MS DOS 4.2 machine
while creating that “Birthday Card”.
And then instantly I remembered my pretty girl. It was 4 months since she had very
politely told me to “take a walk…”
I will summarise 2 key conversations
that I had with her which will give the entire crux in the least number of words….
The next day after I gave her the “Birthday
Card” or Floppy diskette or whatever one might call it, she met me and was
simply ecstatic. She exclaimed that she was thrilled
by those wonderful animations and superb graphics unfolding like magic one
after the other in beautiful colours that very exactly as per her taste. The
intertwining of music, messages, graphics
and animation and the lovely blended patterns and spectrum of colours
displayed was truly a wonderful experience and the first of its kind for her.
She asked me as to where I obtained that amazing graphics program from. I told
her that I wrote it all myself. She asked me “you mean you made it yourself?” I
replied “Yes”. She complimented me on my computer science talent and then went
her way.
After a month and a few casual conversations
with her, I met her again one afternoon. The most crucial conversation went as follows:
SHE: What is your career ambition?
ME: I aspire to do an MBA from a
premier B School in India and take up a job in a leading Indian corporate
SHE: Why do you want to stay back in
India? Everyone in our college is going to the U.S. and there is so much future
there for Computer Engineers. People from all branches of engineering are
aspiring to take up jobs in Computer Science field in the US and despite being a
Computer Engineering student, you intend to stay back in India?
ME: Yes I want to stay back in India
ME: Two reasons: 1. I want to stay
closer to my parents 2. I have a great conviction in the India growth story
especially after the liberalization and reforms of 1991 and I really want to be
a part of that growth story and see it unravel before my eyes… I am sure that
will be a great feeling and nothing else in the world can beat it…
SHE: Isn’t that too idealistic? You seem
to have good talent in Computer Science and you could make a lot of money in
the US and have a really lavish life style that one could not even imagine in
India…
ME: Doing an MBA from a premier B School
ensures that one gets a well-paying job and a very good career on the
management side. In the MBA class of 1994, the highest salary offered at a top
B School was 30,000 Rupees which is very good and is many times more than the
highest salary offer in our college for the Engineering Class of 1994 which was
4,500 Rupees.
SHE: Do you realise 30,000 Rupees a
month is 500 Dollars?
ME: Actually that is the highest
salary that was offered across all premier B Schools that year. Probably 16000
to 20000 Rupees is a more realistic number.
No sooner had I said that than I realised what she was trying to subtly
get to……
I came out of my reverie and my mind
switched back to the “Design of the
Operating System” class and our professor was then explaining the concepts
of Segmentation and Page Faults.
I thought about the efforts and hard-work that
had gone into the “creation of that
Birthday Card”. I once again felt very proud about my creation and warmth
filled my heart. However my regret was that due to the ‘top secret’ nature of the endeavour, I could not even talk to
anyone and proudly explain the cutting edge technology that I had used, the complexities
in the design, key technological challenges that I had overcome and all other
exploits that I had made on the computer in my endeavour of conceptualising and creating the most
thrilling experience ever only for
her sake.
The thought of spending an hour with
her and talking about all these technological aspects did occur to me at times as
I thought that it would atleast give me some solace. But then I realised there
is no point in doing that as she would not be able to understand or even appreciate
the complexity and challenges involved at all. Perhaps I should have fallen in Love with a girl in Computer Engineering
so that even if she had asked me to “take
a walk..” she would have atleast understood and appreciated the hard work, immense
efforts, challenges faced and technological complexity behind the “Birthday
Card” !!!
