My Accidental Education in Personal Computing
I cannot remember the exact year our first computer arrived. It was probably sometime during my last few years at university, although it might have been shortly after, and the more I try to pin the date down the more the details seem to slide around. I can remember what the machine looked like far more clearly than when it appeared: a broad beige box, a substantial keyboard and a monochrome monitor that filled the room with green text against a black screen.
My dad brought it home for my sister and me, and I am fairly sure it had previously been used in his office. It was not a shiny new family purchase with manuals, sealed software and carefully packed accessories. It had already lived another life somewhere else, which was probably quite typical of how computers first entered many homes then. Somebody’s office upgraded, the old machine still worked, and rather than discard it, it found another job.
I remember it as an IBM XT 286, although after several decades I would not bet anything important on the exact model number. What remains definite in my head are the two floppy drives on the front: one for those large, genuinely floppy 5.25-inch disks and another for the newer 3.5-inch disks encased in hard plastic. At the time the smaller disks looked reassuringly modern, even though both formats now feel like objects from the same archaeological dig.
The setup also included a dot-matrix printer. For years I thought it was an Epson, but it could equally have been a Citizen, and the brand has long since faded into the sort of family-memory fog where logos disappear but noises remain. What I remember very clearly is the mechanical racket it made as the print head travelled from side to side, striking the ribbon against continuous-form paper until even a simple one-page document sounded like a small manufacturing process taking place on the table.
That was how personal computing began for me: not with a sleek interface, a mouse or anything resembling the internet, but with a second-hand office computer, a green screen and a handful of handwritten notes telling me what to type.
Learning DOS from scraps of paper
The computer ran MS-DOS, although I have no idea now which version it was. I originally thought it might have been DOS 6.22 because that became familiar later, but the timing does not really fit the earliest years of the machine, so it is safer to leave it as simply DOS. That feels more truthful anyway because I certainly was not paying attention to operating-system version numbers when I was trying to work out how to get from one directory to another.
The machine did not come with a manual, at least not one that ever reached us. Perhaps it had once been sitting in a drawer in my dad’s office, perhaps somebody threw it away during the move, or perhaps nobody thought we needed it because someone had written down the important commands for us. Those notes became my introduction to computing, a small collection of instructions that I followed without necessarily understanding why they worked.
There was DIR to see what was inside a disk or directory, CD to move somewhere else, and CD.. to climb back out again. Then there were the names of programmes and the executable files needed to start them, copied down because there was no menu waiting to rescue you if you forgot. I probably learned a handful of other commands along the way, but those basic movements through the file system were enough to make the computer gradually feel less impenetrable.
I did not learn DOS in any organised sense. Nobody sat me down and explained file structures, command syntax or what an operating system actually did. I learned by copying what somebody else had written, trying it, making mistakes and eventually remembering what worked. If a command failed, the machine did not offer a helpful suggestion or ask whether I meant something similar. It simply told me I was wrong and left me staring at the blinking cursor.
There is something almost comical about comparing that with computing now. Today, when I cannot remember how to do something, I can search for it, watch a video, ask a chatbot or find twenty people online who have already made exactly the same mistake. Back then, if the scrap of paper beside the keyboard did not contain the answer, I either experimented or waited until I could ask someone who knew more than I did.
The funny thing is that this slightly improvised education worked. Eventually the commands stopped looking like programming and became ordinary movements through the machine. I learned enough to find files, start applications, switch between drives and generally get where I wanted to go without feeling that one wrong keystroke might somehow destroy everything.
WordStar and the page I could not quite see
One of the first programmes we used regularly was WordStar. I cannot remember whether it was already installed when the machine arrived or whether somebody supplied it on a floppy disk, but it quickly became the programme we used for anything that needed typing.
Calling it a word processor makes it sound more familiar than it really felt. WordStar did not give you a beautifully rendered sheet of virtual paper with accurate fonts, margins and spacing. You typed into a screen full of text and commands, and the page you eventually printed existed partly in your imagination until the printer confirmed whether you had done things correctly.
That separation between screen and paper seems strange now. Modern software constantly tries to show us exactly what the finished object will look like before we commit to anything, whereas WordStar required a degree of faith. You typed, saved, printed a test page and adjusted whatever looked wrong after the dot-matrix printer had finished announcing the whole exercise to everyone within earshot.
The printer used continuous-form paper with the perforated tractor-feed holes running down both edges. The paper folded backwards and forwards into a stack, and after printing you tore each page along the horizontal perforations before removing the narrow strips from the sides. Those strips seemed to end up everywhere: beside the printer, behind the table, on the floor, twisted into little paper springs or used for whatever pointless thing was amusing at the time.
We also printed birthday and holiday banners, which felt surprisingly impressive then. Large block letters and crude graphics would slowly emerge across several joined sheets of paper, each section accompanied by that relentless mechanical chatter. The finished result was folded, dotted, perforated and usually slightly uneven when it was finally taped to a wall, but none of that mattered because the computer had made it.
Looking back, it was primitive graphic production, although I certainly did not think of it that way. Today I could produce something infinitely cleaner in a few minutes, choose from thousands of typefaces, add photographs or illustrations, export a PDF and send it to a printer without moving from my desk. Yet there was something satisfying about watching the physical object appear line by line, with all the limitations of the technology completely visible.
The same machine did the work and played the games
The computer had respectable uses, of course. We could write papers, prepare documents and print things for university or home, which gave the whole setup enough educational legitimacy to justify its presence.
But the same beige machine also became a games console whenever the right floppy went into the drive. There was no separate gaming rig, no digital storefront and no enormous library permanently installed on the hard drive. You found the disk, navigated to the correct directory, typed whatever command was required and waited to see whether the programme would actually start.
I remember playing Dangerous Dave, 1942 and Prince of Persia. Dangerous Dave was straightforward and cheerful in the way many early platform games were: run, jump, collect things and try not to die. 1942 gave us the basic arcade pleasure of moving a small aeroplane around the screen while shooting at everything that appeared from above.
Prince of Persia felt different. The animation was extraordinarily fluid for the period, and the prince moved with an almost irritating commitment to physics. If I mistimed a jump, there was rarely any way to correct it in mid-air. He would simply continue towards whatever spike-filled or bone-breaking fate I had arranged for him with the resigned body language of somebody who had already accepted that I was not very good at this.
Part of the entertainment was getting the games to run at all. PC gaming still overlapped with ordinary computer operation, so knowing how to move through directories and launch executable files was part of the experience rather than something hidden behind a launcher. In that sense, even wasting time was teaching me how the machine worked.
When colour finally appeared
At some point the green monochrome world gave way to colour, although this is one of those sections of the timeline where several machines and upgrades have blurred together. I cannot remember whether we replaced the monitor, upgraded the graphics hardware or were already using a slightly different configuration by then.
What I do remember is suddenly having games in colour, probably sixteen-colour VGA at first, and that alone made the computer feel like a different object. After becoming used to green text and simple monochrome graphics, even a limited palette looked extravagant.
One of the colour games I remember was strip poker, which is possibly the most honest example I can offer of what people actually did when a new display technology became available. The computing industry had spent years improving graphics standards, engineers had found ways of displaying more colours, and somewhere along the line we decided one sensible application was pixelated strip poker.
There are cleaner narratives of technological progress, but they are probably less accurate.
The Macintosh LC II that nearly changed the story
When the old machine was finally due for a serious replacement, I remember considering two very different directions. One was another PC. The other was a Macintosh LC II.
By then I was already moving towards visual communication and design, so the appeal of the Macintosh was obvious even before I fully understood why designers seemed to gravitate towards it. Compared with DOS machines, the Mac looked as though it had been designed around things you could see and manipulate rather than commands you had to remember. There was a mouse, a graphical desktop and a general sense that the computer wanted to behave more like a visual tool than a piece of office equipment.
I still sometimes wonder what would have happened if we had chosen the LC II. Perhaps I would have entered desktop publishing earlier, learned a different group of programmes and developed the sort of early Mac habits that could become almost tribal in the design world. Perhaps nothing important would have changed and I would simply have spent the next few years complaining about a different set of compatibility problems.
That is the odd thing about technology choices made when you are young. At the time they are practical decisions involving price, specifications and what is available in the shops. Decades later they start looking like alternate timelines.
We chose the PC.
The assembled Cyrix tower
The replacement was an assembled tower rather than a complete branded system. Somebody at a computer shop put together the case, motherboard, processor, memory, storage and graphics hardware, presumably according to whatever combination of budget and performance made sense at the time.
I remember it as having a Cyrix 386 processor, although again I would not treat that description as a museum catalogue entry. It may have been a 386-class setup with a Cyrix processor or one of the hybrid configurations that were common in assembled machines. What mattered to me then was that it was newer, quicker and equipped with a dedicated VGA card.
I cannot remember how much RAM it had or how large the hard drive was. I probably knew both figures very well at the time because computer ownership involved keeping track of those numbers, comparing them with what friends had and calculating how much could be added before the next upgrade became unavoidable. Now the specifications have evaporated while the general sensation remains: more space, more colour, more speed and a machine that felt considerably less constrained than the one before it.
Hard-drive space always seemed generous when the computer was new. Then programmes grew larger, files multiplied and suddenly the enormous drive you had been bragging about six months earlier was full. That pattern would repeat itself for the rest of my computing life.
Windows 3.1 and the arrival of the visual desktop
The assembled tower took me from DOS into Windows 3.1, which felt like a substantial change even though DOS was still lurking beneath it. There was Program Manager, File Manager, icons, windows and a mouse pointer that could move around the screen without requiring me to remember quite so many commands.
The computer began to feel more like a workspace. Files could be seen as objects, programmes lived inside groups, and windows could overlap in ways that started to resemble a messy physical desk. For someone already heading towards graphic design, that shift from textual navigation to visual organisation probably mattered more than I realised.
Windows 3.1 could still be temperamental, and the illusion of a smooth graphical environment often disappeared the moment two programmes disagreed with one another. It sometimes felt as though several unrelated systems had been persuaded to share the same office rather than genuinely integrated into one operating environment.
Still, the direction was obvious. The command prompt had stopped being the entire world.
Buying Windows 95 with my own money
When Windows 95 came out, I bought a copy with my own money. That detail has stayed with me because it was probably one of the first times I spent a meaningful amount on software simply because I wanted the new version.
My copy came on a stack of 3.5-inch floppy disks. Installing it was not something you casually started and ignored while doing something else because the computer kept asking for the next disk. You inserted one, waited, removed it, inserted another and watched the progress continue with the low-level anxiety that one of the disks might suddenly decide it was unreadable.
There was something almost ceremonial about software installation then. The physical media reminded you that the programme had size and that moving several megabytes onto a computer was an actual process. If the installation failed near the end, you had not merely lost a few minutes of background activity; you had spent a considerable part of the evening feeding disks into the machine.
When it finally started properly, Windows 95 looked dramatically more modern than Windows 3.1. The Start button, taskbar and desktop arrangement made the system feel more coherent, even though there were still plenty of occasions when the whole thing behaved as if modernity had been introduced rather abruptly.
I remember being pleased that I had bought it myself. It was not the family computer arriving from my dad’s office anymore. I was beginning to choose what went inside the machine.
When the encyclopaedia moved onto a disc
The arrival of the CD-ROM drive was another moment when the computer suddenly seemed capable of swallowing things that had previously occupied physical space. Compared with a floppy disk, a compact disc appeared to hold an absurd amount of information. Games came with speech, music and video, programmes grew larger, and reference works that once filled shelves could arrive in a plastic jewel case.
We had Microsoft Encarta and a digital edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, which quickly became part of how we did research. Our printed Britannica set had always looked serious and permanent on the shelf, the sort of family purchase that was supposed to remain useful indefinitely. Looking something up required choosing the right volume, pulling it out, finding the article and sometimes following a cross-reference into another book.
The CD-ROM version made all of that feel slow almost overnight. Type a subject, search, follow a hyperlink, look at a picture, listen to an audio clip, move into another article. It was not the internet yet, but it already contained some of the mental habits the internet would later make normal.
The printed books did not instantly become worthless, of course. They could still be richer, easier on the eyes and immune to software problems. But the balance had shifted, and it was difficult not to notice that an expensive wall of knowledge had been compressed into a few shiny discs.
Technology has always had a slightly ruthless streak that way. It does not wait for the old thing to wear out before making it feel obsolete.
The odd little world of Kingdom O’ Magic
One CD-ROM game that has remained lodged in my memory is Kingdom O’ Magic. I remember the tone more than the exact sequence of puzzles: a strange, comic fantasy world that treated the conventions of role-playing games and Tolkien-style quests with considerably less respect than most fantasy games of the period.
It arrived during that peculiar CD-ROM moment when developers were discovering what to do with all the extra storage. Suddenly there could be more dialogue, voices, animation, rendered backgrounds and all sorts of things that would have been impractical across a stack of floppy disks. Not all of it was elegant, and some games seemed to include multimedia simply because they finally could.
That uncertainty is part of what makes the period interesting now. Games had not yet converged on the interfaces, camera systems and production formulas that would later become familiar, so odd things slipped through. Kingdom O’ Magic felt like one of those slightly unruly experiments, funny and memorable enough that it stayed with me long after technically more impressive games had disappeared from my head.
The USRobotics modem starts screaming
Then the computer acquired a modem and the room changed again. The first one I remember was a USRobotics 28.8K modem, later replaced by a USRobotics 56K model, although the actual speed delivered by the telephone line often seemed to have only a loose relationship with the numbers printed on the casing.
Connecting to the internet meant listening to a sequence of clicks, whistles, static and electronic shrieks as the modem tried to negotiate a connection over the telephone line. People now reproduce the dial-up sound as a piece of comforting technological nostalgia, but I do not remember it as particularly comforting at the time. It was the sound of waiting to find out whether the connection would succeed.
Sometimes it did, sometimes it failed, and sometimes someone elsewhere in the house picked up another telephone and killed the connection at precisely the wrong moment. A download at ninety per cent could vanish because somebody wanted to make a call, which was one of those small domestic conflicts that broadband later quietly removed from the world.
We eventually used prepaid internet through Pinoymail.com. Being online still had a sense of cost attached to it because the telephone line was occupied and the prepaid time was disappearing while you used it. You did not leave the connection running thoughtlessly for days because simply being online felt like something you were actively consuming.
That did not mean we used the time efficiently. It simply meant we wasted it with greater awareness.
People reduced to usernames
Once the internet arrived, the computer stopped being a machine that connected only the people physically sitting in front of it. Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, mIRC and PIRCH98 opened the screen onto a much larger social space where people were represented by usernames, status messages and tiny profile images.
I made friends that way. Some were people I already knew, while others existed at first only as names on a contact list or lines of text appearing in a chat window. There was something strange and rather liberating about meeting people before seeing much of their real-world context, although the anonymity also produced its fair share of nonsense.
IRC channels could be particularly chaotic. Several conversations would move at once, somebody would enter dramatically, somebody else would leave just as dramatically, colours would be changed until the text became almost unreadable, and people with elaborate usernames behaved as though the fate of civilisation rested on an argument taking place in a chat room at one in the morning.
Yahoo Messenger and ICQ felt more personal because the contact list created a small neighbourhood of familiar names. You recognised who was online, waited for certain people to appear and sometimes kept conversations going for hours. The computer had stopped being only a work or entertainment machine and had become somewhere people could be.
What strikes me now is how easy it was to lose those people. Someone could stop logging in, change accounts or simply vanish. There was no social network pushing them back into your feed, no algorithm announcing a birthday years later and no automatic suggestion that you reconnect.
The internet is often described as a place where nothing is ever forgotten, but the early internet could forget people remarkably well.
LimeWire, Kazaa and the long wait for an MP3
Music changed with the arrival of file-sharing programmes such as LimeWire and Kazaa. They turned the computer into a vast, disorganised record shop where the labels were unreliable, the stock came from strangers and there was always a reasonable chance that something else was hiding inside the package.
Downloading a single MP3 over dial-up could take long enough that the progress bar became part of the experience. You watched it crawl upwards, hoping the connection would survive, and when it finally reached one hundred per cent there was still no guarantee that the file was actually the song named in the search result.
Sometimes the title was wrong. Sometimes the recording was awful. Sometimes only part of the song had been uploaded, and occasionally the file contained something so unrelated that you had to admire the confidence with which it had been mislabelled.
There was also the constant, largely justified suspicion that peer-to-peer software was bringing various unwanted passengers onto the machine. We knew this was not exactly a controlled distribution system, but the prospect of finding music that was otherwise difficult to locate tended to override good judgement.
Waiting made the successful files feel oddly valuable. When an MP3 finally arrived intact after forty minutes or more, I listened to it because I had invested actual time in acquiring it. Streaming later removed nearly all of that friction, which is objectively better but also changed the relationship between wanting something and having it.
Winamp, Windows Media Player and my favourite, Sonique
Once the MP3s were on the hard drive, they needed somewhere to play. I used Winamp, Windows Media Player and Sonique, with Sonique eventually becoming my favourite.
Winamp was probably the most practical and recognisable of the three. It occupied a narrow strip of desktop space, had a playlist, equaliser and those famously tiny buttons, and could be reskinned until it barely resembled the original programme. Windows Media Player was already there as part of Windows and gradually became more elaborate as Microsoft discovered that media software could apparently look like anything except a normal window.
Then there was Sonique, which looked as though somebody had designed a portable audio player for a science-fiction film made in 1999. Its curved forms, metallic surfaces, free-floating controls and visualisations felt completely different from the rectangular Windows applications around it. I liked it partly because it seemed designed rather than merely assembled.
This was also the great age of software skins. Winamp skins, Windows Media Player skins and Sonique skins could transform the same programme into fake hi-fi equipment, brushed-metal machinery, alien control panels, cartoon characters or interfaces so abstract that finding the Play button became an achievement in itself.
I spent far more time customising media players than any rational productivity calculation would justify. But that was part of the pleasure of having a personal computer then: it could actually become personal, even if your idea of personal expression involved making everything look like the dashboard of a spaceship.
A hundred megabytes in a blue cartridge
As my work became increasingly digital, storage stopped being an abstract specification and became a practical problem. Graphic files were larger than documents, applications were growing and moving work between different machines required something more useful than a handful of 1.44 MB floppy disks.
I bought an Iomega Zip drive, mainly for work but also for storing my own files. The standard Zip disk could hold 100 MB, which now sounds almost comically small but at the time felt enormous compared with a floppy disk.
The drive itself had a distinctive blue case, and the cartridges felt sturdy and professional. Sliding one into the machine was more reassuring than handling a floppy, and having 100 MB of removable storage created the sense that a genuinely substantial project could travel with you.
Design work could move between computers on a single cartridge. Files, images, fonts and other job material could be carried across town and opened on another workstation, assuming of course that the other workstation had a Zip drive.
There was something very physical about digital storage then. A particular job lived on a particular disk. If somebody asked where the artwork was, the answer could literally be that it was inside the blue Zip cartridge sitting in your bag.
The arrangement was reassuring right up until you imagined losing the bag.
Burning files onto plastic
Eventually I acquired a CD burner, which felt like another significant increase in personal technological power. Instead of merely reading the discs produced by software companies, I could now make my own.
Burning a CD required a certain amount of planning because the process took time and a failed write could turn a perfectly good blank disc into a shiny coaster. I would gather the files, arrange them, start the burn and then avoid doing anything unnecessary on the computer until it finished.
Successful discs were labelled with marker pens and placed into cases or sleeves. Some contained work, some contained music, some were backups, and a surprising number eventually acquired handwritten names that made almost no sense a few years later.
This was still a very physical version of digital life. Information accumulated in drawers and boxes as floppy disks, Zip cartridges, CD-ROMs and CD-Rs, all of them carrying scratches, labels and evidence that someone had handled them.
The cloud eventually made much of that physical geography disappear. Files now synchronise silently between machines and exist somewhere behind a login screen, which is immensely convenient provided the account still works, the password is remembered and a helpful synchronisation feature has not decided to delete something everywhere at once.
Progress tends to remove one kind of anxiety and replace it with another that makes less noise.
Moving out and taking the computer life with me
Eventually I moved out of my parents’ house because it was more practical to live closer to where I worked and nearer the part of the city where my industry was based. By then, computers were no longer something I occasionally used at home; they had become woven into the way I worked.
I wrote on them, designed on them, prepared files for production, listened to music, stored projects and communicated with people. The machines kept changing, but the basic relationship had already been established.
Processors became faster, hard drives became larger and displays became better. Software grew more capable and, almost in parallel, more demanding. Every improvement seemed to create the conditions for the next thing that would make the current hardware feel inadequate.
Upgrades came and went so regularly that the individual machines became difficult to separate in memory. One case replaced another, one graphics card overtook the previous one, and storage figures that once seemed enormous became too small to mention.
The computer had gone from being a second-hand office machine sitting in my parents’ house to something around which an increasing amount of adult life was organised.
The Macintosh on the road not taken
I still think occasionally about that Macintosh LC II I nearly chose.
It is not really regret. The PC route made sense for the software, hardware and working environments around me, and in the end it took me exactly where I needed to go. I eventually moved into Macs much later anyway, by which point years of DOS and Windows had already shaped how I thought about computers.
What interests me is the alternate path. If I had gone with the Macintosh early, perhaps desktop publishing and visual computing would have become central sooner. I might have learned different software, developed different habits and entered professional design with a different relationship to the machine.
Or I might simply have spent the same years complaining about different peripherals.
A computer is never only a processor, memory figure or operating system. Over time it becomes a collection of habits, assumptions and little pieces of knowledge that shape how you approach the next machine.
My first computer taught me that I could usually make a machine do what I needed if I knew the next command. The graphical systems taught me that the screen itself could become a design space. The modem taught me that the computer could contain other people, while the CD-ROM, Zip disk and CD burner changed what I thought information could weigh.
None of that felt historically important while it was happening.
Before everything became invisible
The computers I use now are absurdly powerful compared with the machine my dad brought home from his office. They wake almost instantly, render large images, edit video, store enormous libraries and communicate continuously with servers I will never see.
Most of the machinery has disappeared from view. A file uploads without making a sound, backups happen somewhere else, software updates overnight and data moves between devices without requiring me to carry anything across the room.
That is mostly a good thing. I have no particular desire to return to a 28.8K modem, failed floppy disks or a printer that made the table vibrate whenever I needed two pages of text.
I am not going to claim that DOS commands built character, either. Mostly they built a dependence on handwritten notes until I memorised them.
Still, I am glad I began when computers had visible edges and audible consequences. A floppy disk clicked into place, the modem screamed before the internet arrived, the CD-ROM spun loudly inside the tower, and the dot-matrix printer physically dragged paper across the desk one perforated sheet at a time.
Storage had weight. Files had locations. Connections could be heard establishing themselves. The limitations of the machine were constantly visible, and learning to work around those limitations was part of learning to use a computer at all.
I did not know I was watching the transition from personal computing as a specialised activity into the almost invisible infrastructure of everyday life. I was simply trying to finish a document in WordStar, print a birthday banner, make the prince clear another pit, install Windows from another floppy, download one MP3 before somebody picked up the telephone or decide which Sonique skin looked best.
The processor speeds and hard-drive capacities have mostly disappeared from memory. I cannot say for certain which version of MS-DOS ran on that first machine, whether the printer was Epson or Citizen, or exactly what model of Cyrix processor ended up inside the next tower.
What I do remember is the green screen, the handwritten commands beside the keyboard and the little blinking cursor waiting in the dark for me to tell the machine what to do. I learned enough to type something, then something else, and without really noticing it I had started down a road that would eventually become my work, my music, my communication, my storage, my research and a rather large part of the rest of my life.
It began with a second-hand computer nobody wanted in the office anymore.
That seems about right.
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