C++, dbaseIII+, cigarettes & Cutting chai - Down the geek memory lane

I was extremely bored and I was just going through my Facebook posts, when I saw like so many comments on one of the posts that I had written about a recent movie, I had seen on HBO. "The Pirates of the Silicon Valley" yes, it's the Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates story. Many of you might have seen it. So anyways, coming back to why this blog has got anything to do with it... I posted one of the quotes from that movie

"Someone in HP said to Steve Jobs: What on earth would ordinary people want with computers?"

I mean who on earth would ever think of saying something like that? A terribly foolish person to us in this day and age or a completely sane person of that age... Well whatever the case maybe, this post attracted all my geek buddies way back from college and all of us started discussing about our college days and computer engineering professor, a certain Mr. Chaudhary! woah... was he a professor or what.

Besides knowing zilch about C, C++ at least not enough to teach us programming, he sucked so bad at speaking English, that we wondered how on earth did he even get a job in the college. All that apart, I wondered to myself, how on earth did I get into doing what I'm doing in life now. Where did all those extremely geeky days go?? Those programming lectures, the working on C++ on Windows 95,98 consoles, the  chatting on DOS network in computer labs, designing simple but really whacky programs... Man what days we used to have.

Those hackathon sessions at friends place. Wow! Hanging out at the guy who had a computer, under the pretext of learning programming and trying out new codes, while half the night being spent in playing Mech Warrior or Prince of Persia 2D or for that matter watching soft porn...

Those were the days when college projects were ripped off from the books in library, those were the days when engineering drawing sheets were glow traced, the days when bunking college and escaping from the back door while the professor is entering from the front. What a rush!!!

Those were the days when fighting over silly things as who would write the program first or who would get to use the computer in the laboratory more. Those days when keeping a tenner inside your underwear after being caught by the TC while travelling ticket-less to college and using the same money for cigarettes and cutting chai at Durgaprasad (local chai tapri) also known as DP (not the Twitter,FB DP), those were the days when going to the local cybercafe and surfing internet for Rs. 20 was one big deal!! Mostly, chatting with girls on ICQ, Yahoo and Rediff gave us a great high...

Those were the days when we enjoyed messing around with circuit boards and LED's in EDC practicals (Electronic Devices & Circuits) yet struggling with the AND OR & NOT circuit diagrams during exams! Those were the days when college was full of termwork and assignments and completing those sitting up all night and sleeping in the last bench while listening to music on the radio worth Rs. 30 (Scan button)

Those were the days when being pushed around by the heftiest and the biggest fellow in class, especially on the first day of college, and still having the guts to stand up stupidly and trying to fight back. Later on realize that he happened to be a friend of a friend and being thankful (sigh, thank GOD, else it would have been curtains for me)

Those were the days when giving presentations and seminars on dbaseIII+, that being my favorite subject only because of the lecturer who by the way was one of the most amazing and at least to our knowledge best lectureres in the college, migh I add (She) was very intelligent too...

Such was life back in college and in fact many more things that I might have missed out on, truly if this was one of those stories that really turned out to be what we really wanted it to be... then I'd not be blogging about it but writing a code somewhere in the 'Silicon Valley' probably... Nevertheless, a tribute to those geeky days of Computer engineering, which I'm proud to have relinquished, yet feel proud about for I am what I am today and I don't regret any part of it!

Here is a simple C++ program that I explored recently on my Turbo C++ installed by inspiration. Here's taking a trip to nostalgia! A tribute to  'Let us C' by Yashwant Kanetkar :)

/* Hello.C - - Hello, World */

#include<stdio.h>

inte main ()

{

printf<"Hello World\n");

return 0;

}

This certainly calls for a reunion! :-) To the Geeky college Memories of our lives!