Ben-Hur on a computer screen
I kept looking, completely mesmerized. The teacher hit the key again, and a scene from a movie played. It was a chariot race from Ben-Hur. On a computer screen. It felt wrong. It felt like magic. The clip was less than five seconds.
"One day, everyone will watch movies on computers", he said.
In the 1990s, in Brazil, computers were suddenly all the rage. Fernando Henrique Cardoso's "Plano Real" had managed to do what everyone thought impossible: to end hyperinflation. Our soon-to-be president would eventually privatize inefficient public companies, lower import taxes, and resurrect the middle class with an improved buying power. Typewriters gave way to bulky CRT monitors, horizontal computer cases, and comfortable keyboards.
Those who couldn't afford a computer might enroll in "cursos de informática" where they learned how to move the mouse by playing Microsoft Minesweeper, among other things. It is hard to believe that there was a time when doing simple arithmetic on the Windows calculator was a challenge.
I learned fast. I even knew what a floppy disk ("disquete") was, and how to use it. My teacher bragged one day about his Zip Drive that could hold up to 250 MB of data. He showed it to me, and my God, I wanted one. I don't remember why I wanted it or what I would put inside it. It was just so freaking cool.
Hyper-advanced stuff like Microsoft Word, Excel, or Access was beyond the scope of the course. Moving the mouse was challenging enough. There's a lot we take for granted today. Before the Internet, an unplugged computer was an interesting specimen. I never had much talent for programming and math, but that didn't make computers any less fascinating.
My mother got some kind of IBM computer. A clone, that's for sure. It didn't have a hard drive. You inserted a large floppy disk and watched a counter go up. And up. And up. Eventually, it booted. After a while, that was replaced by an IBM XT. A big upgrade! It had games somehow. Alley Cat was my favourite. I played it again recently, but it didn't hit the same. At some point, my mother believed that the games were making the machine run slowly. A classic. Of course they weren't.
When things got better we got a Windows machine. Computers did not respond with the viciousness of kids in my school. I messed with it, clicked on everything, did all the things I shouldn't do. It forgave me every time without a hint of resentment. Once or twice, my mother had to call the computer guy to fix something I did. The computer never tattled. The guy was nice to me, too. When I nuked the hard drive trying to install Red Hat Linux, he looked at me and winked. Computer guy had my back.
I never overcame my fascination with computers. They are mysterious beasts. Like mythical creatures, they do my bidding if I provide them with special offerings and incantations. I don't wish to learn their idioms. It is better this way, for a language cannot be magic and known in equal measure.