Childhood Computing – Susam Pal

By Susam Pal On 24th May 2026

Recently I came across a great blog post called Childhood Computing. It made me think about my childhood computing experiences. I am much older than the author of the above post but like him, I also like computers. I have for most of my life.

In 1992, when I was eight years old, my parents decided to transfer me to a new school because of its curriculum. They didn’t know it then, and perhaps it didn’t matter to them, but this new school had a computer lab. It was quite remarkable for its time. I grew up in a very small industrial town. The computers in the lab were hand-crafted from the silica factory around which the city was built. We only got two hours per month in the computer lab, but the little time I got there opened up a whole new world to me.

We had to leave our shoes at the door before entering the lab. ‘These are expensive machines. We should keep them free from dust’, our teacher used to say. It was a ritual. The computers were very old IBM PC compatible machines, mostly with monochrome cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitors. He didn’t have any hard disk. They had a few hundred kilobytes of RAM. Every time we performed the same ritual. Insert a 5¼-inch floppy disk to load MS-DOS into memory. Then insert another disk to load LOGO.COM. Then write small logo programs and watch the turtle move. I’ve written more about that early Logo programming experience here: FD100. Also, since there was no hard disk and storage was at a premium, nothing was ever saved. As soon as you turn off the computer, all your work disappears. So saving a program means literally writing that program to a physical notebook.

Since I got so little time with an actual computer, most of my Logo programming was done at home with pen and paper. I would ‘test’ my programs by tracing the results on graph paper. Eventually, I would get about thirty minutes of actual time to operate the computer in the lab. I still remember drawing a house with animated dashed lines in a special logo program, where the dashes moved around the outline of the house. Everyone around me loved it, they copied it and made changes to it, changing colors, changing details, and adding their own little touches. That might have been my first ‘free and open source software’. The ‘license’ was ‘do whatever you want, but if you make any interesting modifications, show me’. The delivery system was entirely analog: classmates copied the code into their notebooks with pencil, then went back to their machines in the lab and typed it back into the computer.

Sometimes, when we successfully completed logo programming exercises our teacher set challenges for us, he even let us play computer games. The first computer game I played was Moon Bugs. Space Invaders, Bricks, Dangerous Dave and others were some of my other favorites. Space Invaders inspired me to write my own game, but the little GW-BASIC programming I knew at the time and my limited access to computers was insufficient to write anything more sophisticated than simple text-based input/output programs. But eventually, in 2022, as an adult, I managed to write an Invaders-like game, which you can find here: Andromeda Invaders. Although thirty years too late, writing this game fulfilled a childhood dream!

A friend of mine liked a game called Digger developed by Windmill Software. It soon became my favorite too. The game came on a self-booting disk, so we didn’t have to go through the elaborate process of inserting a floppy disk first to load DOS. We can directly insert the Digger floppy disk and the computer will boot and the game will start immediately.

Another computer game I remember well was Grand Prix Circuit by Accolade. I loved typing commands GPEGA To launch the game, knowing that in a moment I would be greeted by its excellent opening music. The Grand Prix circuit blew my mind. As a kid who only knew how to draw basic two-dimensional geometric shapes with Logo and GW-BASIC, I found it amazing that a computer program could create a projection of a three-dimensional imaginary world that you could navigate with keyboard input. I wondered how this was possible.

It has been over 30 years since then, but the memories and emotions are still fresh in my mind. At times I can close my eyes and remember the buzz of dozens of computers running in the lab, the beeps from Power-On Self-Test (POST) and the distinct, strangely pleasant smell of the closed, air-conditioned room. For some reason, that smell is one of my strongest memories of those days. I’ve never been able to describe it well, but occasionally I encounter one in the most unexpected places, like a corridor somewhere, or a shop, and it takes me back to those early childhood computing days. Those childhood computing experiences remain some of my strongest and most vivid memories. They were such magical experiences, full of wonder and exploration.