This content originally appeared on HackerNoon and was authored by Anand
✍️ This story is part of my series, Dev Uncaged —where I share unscripted stories that have shaped the developer and builder in me.
\ 🖼️ The illustrations in this post are auto-generated using BlogCanvas—a tool I’m building for creators and bloggers to illustrate key moments effortlessly and stay focused on telling compelling stories.
\ Here’s Dev Story 1—my first ever taste of digital creation. Hope it brings back memories for some of you!
\ The year was 1993, the beginning of my 4th grade… We headed through the hallway in excitement towards the computer lab. None of us had seen a real computer before. We were about to interact with the magical mystery box that had lived in our imagination so far. On the way, I recollected a statement about a famous Indian comic character, Chacha Chaudhary:
\ "Chacha Chaudhary ka dimaag computer se bhi tez chalta hai." (a Hindi phrase)
(Translation: Chacha Chaudhary’s brain works faster than a computer.)
\
\ We finally arrived… and the door opened, with a cold breeze of the AC welcoming us… In front of us were around a dozen white magical boxes arranged evenly in the room. Each computer had a monitor sitting on top of a CPU, a floppy disk drive (probably 8-inch or 5 ¼-inch), and a keyboard.
\ Every one of us got a dedicated computer. After giving us a brief tour, our teacher asked us to open our notebooks and type the first LOGO program we were taught—to draw a rectangle.
\
\ We all began typing… It took us time to navigate the keyboard, looking for the right keys. We would skim through the keyboard using pointed fingers, sometimes taking forever to find a single character. Most of the time, we were looking down at the keyboard, and once in a while, when we glanced at the monitor in front of us, we were greeted with typos.
\ Huh… and after all that effort of typing, when we hit the run button, the program still didn’t work for many. However, I could see some happy faces—those whose programs worked. They were super excited, some even loudly seeking attention for their success.
\ I stared at my screen, defeated. The cursor blinked, mocking me.
\ The teacher finally arrived, scanned my code, and in just a few keystrokes—boom! A rectangle appeared.
\
\ It was amusing to see how a set of instructions translated into a geometric shape.
\ Over the entire year, I wrote a lot of programs to draw different shapes. My most memorable one was a circle-drawing program, which sparked my curiosity even further into the world of programming…
\
\ But then there was a pause… a long pause…
\ The next year, I had to move to a different city. My new school didn’t even have a computer lab.
Two years later, another school. This time, there was a good computer lab, but no real programming for us—just learning basic command-line prompts, playing games, and drawing.
It was the year 2000 when I finally got back to programming in my 11th grade as a major subject…
I was reading about Bill Gates in those days and was fascinated by his story of how he had built Windows OS. I was an average student but started becoming very aspirational. I started seeing programming as a magic wand—something that could bring one's creation to life without much capital investment.
\
\ So, with all the excitement, after a five-year pause, I stepped back into programming… but the pedagogy and curriculum soon killed my motivation. It became like any other subject—dry! I couldn’t see what I could do with it. For passing exams, I would just memorize the programs.
\ But… nearing the end of my 11th grade, something happened… Little did I know, it was about to reignite my interest in programming—and this time, it wouldn’t fade away.
\ Find out in the next Dev Story…
This content originally appeared on HackerNoon and was authored by Anand
Anand | Sciencx (2025-04-02T22:27:00+00:00) Dev Story 1: The First Taste of Digital Creation. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/04/02/dev-story-1-the-first-taste-of-digital-creation/
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