Chapter 10 – Input Method (1/2)
I told my parents about registering for the computer class when I got home, father didn’t object this time, instead, he encouraged me to study hard and don’t give up halfway in the middle.
Father, as an engineer in the factory, knew exactly the importance of studying computers to work in the future. He gave me the class fee without saying anything else, and praised my sensibility of starting to study. In 1994, computers were not yet become the gaming devices that parents would say that are in the future, nor were they called electronic drugs. Computers were still very mysterious in the eyes of most people at this time, and were a symbol of high tech automation.
The computer suite of Shao Nian Gong was very small, with only around twenty computers, they were all a single colored Lenovo 386. There were only four or five people sitting idly when I entered, completely unlike the atmosphere with several tens of people in the sanda class the previous day. No wonder the trial fees were that expensive, it was any lower, then there wouldn’t even be enough to pay the teacher.
The computers in this era could be said as extremely boring for our generation, nowhere near as exciting as gaming devices. It was because of computers being so mysterious that a lot of children, and even parents, thought of it as a scientific device detached from the mundane life, only a few parents with foresight would send teir students here to study.
I sat down at a seat near the back, and turned on the computer. The familiar self-checking sound rang out, and made me really excited as I stared at the screen, waiting for the familiar little widow to pop up.
En? Why did the screen go black? I stared at the prompt in front of my eyes, then suddenly remembered, the computers within the country were sill in the DOS era.
Isn’t this making bricks without straws? I, who had gotten used to a graphical user interface, actually had to face such a prompt, it was fortune that I had studied DOS6.22 and TC2.0, or else I would have had no idea of where to begin.
I skillfully got out the folders menu in the hard disk, and saw that the only programming languages that could be use were BASIC and LOGO, TC wasn’t even installed. There were a few other programs that could be used to practice typing. BASIC was the language I was the worst at while studying and was also the least used one, even if when I did use it, it was through VB, so I didn’t have to remember the language itself. I have never even used LOGO, nor have I ever seen any co-workers use it.
“Liu Lei?” Suddenly I heard an extremely moving voice call out my name, and it was a voice I could recognize even in my sleep, from our cute classmate, Zhao Yanyan.
“Liu Lei, it really is you, why are you here?” Zhao Yanyan frankly sat down on the seat beside me.
“I should be the one asking you this right? Aren’t you learning to dance?” I stopped what I was operating and asked Zhao Yanyan.
“How did you know I’m taking dance lessons here?” Zhao Yanyan looked at me suspiciously.
Sweat begun to drip from my forehead, she nearly saw through me, logically speaking I shouldn’t have known that Zhao Yanyan was learning to dance here. School only started for a week, Zhao Yanyan never mentioned it to me, but in my previous life, I knew that Zhao Yanyan would learn to dance at Shao Nian Gong every Saturday.
I took a deep breath, and pretended like it was nothing, “I saw you when I came to learn sanda yesterday.”
“Oh, you’re learning sanda, I can’t tell. But that’s not right, Liu Lei, “Zhao Yanyan immediately spoke in a laughing, yet not laughing ton, “I didn’t even come to dance class yesterday, so Liu Lei, come clean, how did you find out?”
My god, this is impossible! I was adding insult to injury, it really was like when a clever person becoming the victim of their own ingenuity. However, at that momnt my savior appeared, an old geezer walked onto the podium, and said to us, “Good, be quiet everyone, I’m about to begin the lesson.”