For a Lebanese child growing up in the 90s, my first contact with computers happened relatively early. At 6, my classmates and I were shown into a room full of bulky screens, keyboards and mice. Once a week, we sat in pairs on backless grey benches facing a nameless colouring software. Our tiny hands took turns moving the cursor to fill the outlined canvas with questionable colour combinations.
Alongside this hands-on exercise, the teacher would explain what made a computer tick: processor, memory and all. That glimpse into the machine's entrails thrilled me. It echoed my pathological pleasure in taking my toys apart and seeing what lives inside. I'd convince myself, and my mum, that I'd manage to put them back together. Needless to say, that was rarely the case. I lacked the dexterity (and patience) of experienced factory workers – or robots – assembling those toys in a land far, far away. I was programmed obsolescence personified.
But it wasn't all in vain. Though unspeakable amounts of plastic piled up in Lebanon's faltering waste system, I upcycled a lot of the electronics, in particular, the small motors found in remote-controlled cars. They unwillingly contributed to my super secret space programme. I was convinced that by wiring a motor to a battery pack and attaching spinning blades, I'd create something that flies. I soon upgraded my arsenal by introducing fireworks. Binding rockets sold for New Year's eve together, I finally launched something into space, also known as our upstairs neighbour's balcony. After many attempts, burnt fingers and alleged UFO sightings, I laid my ambitions to rest and moved on to my next classified endeavour.
On some lucky Saturdays, my father, a police officer, took me to work. The Lebanese government was digitalising, just in time for the looming Y2K. Dusty typewriters were on their way out replaced by state-of-the-art computers. So instead of sleeping in, I was ready by 7am, chasing the promise of using that mythical machine in my dad's office. Looking back at it now, I wonder how such a young child was even allowed into the headquarters of police administration. Oh well, the 90s.
At the same road intersection, my father would pick up a fresh copy of the day's newspaper from the usual street vendor. So fresh, in fact, that its pages were still warm. Stuck in Beirut's stifling traffic jams, he'd glance at the major headlines. Luckily, we were never stopped by the police. I'd reach for the science and technology section and pretend to understand its dense medieval Arabic jargon. News about actual space programmes and how we'd all be living on Mars by the year 2000 lit up my developing brain with excitement. Bumper to bumper on Earth, my mission to conquer the computer was still on the launchpad.
Once at the office, my dad would start his day, and I'd sit mesmerised by the computer, next to a policeman typing away. Handwritten notes flew from all sides, and landed in Microsoft Word before being regurgitated by a giant printer. His fingers danced across the mechanical keys as his eyes oscillated between the paper stack on his desk and the screen, never once glancing at his hands. At exactly 1pm, his shift ended and the computer became mine.
My father, ever the workaholic, never left on time, which gave me a couple of hours of uninterrupted me time with the computer. The ergonomic chair adjusted, I faced the bulging screen and let my imagination run wild. The Windows 3.1 operating system, set to Arabic, greeted me with a right-to-left UI, flipping the script from the French-only computers we had at school.
The main attraction was the handful of pre-installed games, namely Minesweeper and SkiFree. The first was too complicated for my budding synapses. Even at 36, I still blow up more often than I care to admit. The latter was more accessible, but equally terrifying. Being ambushed and eaten by the monster lurking on the slopes might be why I never learned to ski. Crushed by a mountain of losses, I'd turn to Paint for some embarrassing artistic mishaps. Occasionally, I even used that computer for school projects just for a chance to look down at my classmates stuck in the 80s.
I kept up that Saturday ritual for a couple of years, during which the computer was upgraded to the then-shiny Windows 95, and the glorious Solitaire kept me busy for hours on end. Meanwhile, the school's computer curriculum intensified. Long gone were the days of colouring, and in came Microsoft Office and Photoshop. A vague mention of something called "the Internet" was casually dropped every now and then.
My first brush with programming came during those classes, but I didn't realise it at the time. A software called Logo made its entrance. It was home to a poor little turtle that responded to commands by crawling and drawing shapes on the screen. In each class, the teacher would first show us the end result, an elaborate matrix of circles, triangles and squares. Then, writing a series of commands, we'd exploit the turtle's free labour to recreate the masterpiece. That mass-produced art suggested it was possible to "talk" to computers.
Then came Frontpage, Microsoft's stab at creating a WYSIWYG web editor. The plethora of marquee and blink elements I placed on those pages was certainly in poor taste, and the unintelligible HTML and JavaScript generated would have failed any W3C validation. Little did I know I was looking at markup and code a machine could understand.
Some of my friends and relatives had their own computers at home with a library of games living on flimsy floppy disks. Lebanese mothers used to treat computers almost like a piece of vintage furniture that needed to be protected at any cost. Eating anywhere in their vicinity was strictly forbidden. Once turned off, the computer had to be covered to shield it from sunlight, dust and whatever breaking news was airing on post-civil war Lebanese TV.
I finally got my hands on my first personal computer at 9. A friend of my father's running an engineering company was getting rid of some older models, and I happily rescued one from a certain death. It found a proud spot on our large, rarely used dining table. It came with a stack of applications and games. Apparently engineers love to play during work hours. Who knew?. The one I distinctly remember was Duke Nukem 3D, which I played for countless hours, despite not meeting its minimum age and possibly system requirements. The awareness around the dangers of violent video games and their effects on children hadn't reached our side of the Mediterranean yet.
My only real exposure to video games, apart from playing at friends’ houses, came from the cheap NES knock-offs that flooded the Lebanese market in the early 90s. The seemingly 3D graphics of Duke Nukem looked like a million light-year leap compared to the flickering 2D sprites of Mario and Luigi. The game even had mirrors, which I mistook for windows, and I'd keep shooting at my own reflection thinking it was my evil clone. Not knowing about save files, I'd always die on the third level – often courtesy of a rocket launcher at close range through a "window" – and start from scratch.
I also got hooked on running the Defrag tool religiously. Questionable claims of speed gains aside, the hypnotic show of coloured hard drive blocks slotting into place was too strong to resist. But my addictions came to an abrupt end on the fateful day my computer died – or rather the day I killed it. In the spirit of optimisation, I made my way to the System32 folder and discovered a treasure trove of programmes with funny names and even funnier icons. And what did 10-year-me do? Delete them one... by... one. The hard drive space freed gave me a high, followed by a crash the next time I tried to start the computer; it wouldn't boot. Thank God I had no Duke Nukem save files on there.
And so I survived the next two years without my own PC. The once-a-week computer class at school tried to scratch the itch but failed. As the 90s were about to wrap, the excitement and apprehension around the coming millennium were tangible. In the pages of my Dad's daily newspaper much ink was being spilled on the looming Y2K crash and the promised colonisation of Mars.
And with that the first part comes to an end. Would you like to save your progress before loading the next level? This might take a while