:::::Missing My DOS Years:::::
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Wheatfield 62
Around 1984 or so, the city held a science and technology fair at the Cultural Palace. It was there that I first saw a personal computer. Looking back now, it should have been an Apple II computer. At the time, that model had entered mainland China and was then quickly copied in large numbers. Apple felt its intellectual property rights were being infringed upon, so not long after, it pulled out of this market entirely. Ten years later, compared with Microsoft, I think proud Apple must have regretted the pride it had back then.
At that fair, the computer was running a “ping-pong” game, and that made me, seeing a computer for the first time, very curious. Because at the time, I happened to especially like playing table tennis, and I was pretty good at it too. So I stood in a very long line to give it a try—I was fully convinced that however I normally played ping-pong, I could just play it the same way here. Of course that was not the case. In front of the keyboard I was completely at a loss, using one finger after another to look for my “paddle” and the directions, and very quickly I was defeated.
After coming back from the fair, I couldn’t stop thinking about that fun “black box.” So I kept pestering my father, wanting to see the computers at their design institute. After a lot of effort I finally got to see them, and was very disappointed: cold data was jumping on the screen, not “ping-pong.” Of course now I know that what they had there was a minicomputer system and terminals, which had nothing at all to do with personal computers.
But by coincidence, one of my aunts was then studying a computer-related major at a university. One weekend, when she came to my house for a meal, she heard about my curiosity toward computers and said that she and a few classmates were preparing to run a computer training class, and told me to come listen too. I asked: can the computers there play “ping-pong”? She said yes, and they could even draw the “Mona Lisa.” Of course now I also know that the so-called computer-drawn “Mona Lisa” back then just meant that if you stood 2 meters away and looked at the little pinholes printed by a dot-matrix printer, and kind of fooled yourself a bit, then it became the “Mona Lisa.”
Another weekend, I ran off to the university to take a computer class. Generally speaking, computer training in China followed two paths: one was to start by learning BASIC, and once you learned to program in BASIC and could make the computer recite 3.1415926......, then you counted as a programmer; the other path was to start by learning binary, discrete mathematics, computer architecture, and assembly, and once you learned to call various interrupts, then you counted as a senior programmer. The training class my aunt and the others were running took the latter path, so on the first day of class, let alone the “Mona Lisa,” I didn’t even see the shadow of “ping-pong”—I awkwardly did base conversions on my ten fingers. Later I took off my shoes and used my toes too, and still couldn’t make sense of it.
I didn’t dare go a second time. Because if I went again, I really didn’t know what else I’d have to take off. And just like that, a young boy’s computer dream went out.
Then I went to university. The computer teacher was a Manchu, surnamed “Na,” and he taught us BASIC. He was mean-spirited, and had a very bad reputation among the students, so we called him “that B.” Once in his class, we forgot to erase the blackboard, and that B got very angry, stiffened his neck, and said: today I was supposed to start teaching you “Operating Systems,” but now I’m really not going to teach it. You’ll study it yourselves, and this part will count for 15% of the final exam. That B really kept his word. After that he skipped that whole section all the way to the end of the term. That left me dumbfounded. I had no choice but to go to the library, without even knowing what books I ought to read, and in that muddle my DOS era truly began.
In university, generally speaking, things still followed that second path I mentioned above. This time I understood binary, but for the life of me I still couldn’t understand why data had to be put into all those registers, so in the assembly language exam I only got a little over ten points (that is, I got all the binary-conversion questions right, and everything else wrong). On the makeup exam, though, I somehow passed. I say “somehow” because after I started working, for a period of time I wanted to learn assembly again. I picked up the textbook and found that I still only understood that binary part, and absolutely nothing else. In anger I threw the book down and made a vicious oath: TMD, in the future I absolutely must make my son learn assembly well and vent this for me! But only now, assembly language has basically already been eliminated—so life really is full of regrets.
In university, I often had machine time. The machine specs were PC AT, so this makes me quite proud now—I’ve used every kind of machine from PC XT/AT, 286, 386, 486, Pentium, PⅡ, PⅢ, and if you count that “Apple II” I mentioned earlier, then I basically count as having witnessed the development history of personal computers. To get back to using the machines, there was one particularly funny thing: once, Jiao XX from my dorm ran an astrology-sign program. The computer room was very quiet at the time. After he got it debugged successfully, he suddenly shouted excitedly: I’m a virgin! I’m a virgin!! We were startled for a moment, then burst into laughter. Later “I fuck! I’m a virgin!” became a class fad for a while, just like how “I write! I’m a beautiful woman writer!” is popular now—both have that “I think, therefore I am” kind of self-confident tone.
After taking more than a dozen computer-related courses, I graduated and was assigned to some government office. I put my studies to practical use, beginning to specialize in computer games, while also typing in WPS under the Founder Chinese card. My work was highly effective: I helped the leaders get “Beautiful Women Mahjong” running, and printed quite a few summaries, reports, plans, speech outlines, and so on—beautifully typeset, with typo rates controlled to around 1%, and the mistakes were all homophones, so the leaders wouldn’t be embarrassed when giving speeches. The leaders patted me on the shoulder and said: not bad, young man, worthy of being a graduate from a famous university. I was very happy to hear that. And when I was happy, I’d look again at those image floppies a buddy had copied for me—that was what you call “great” days! It’s just a pity I had no money, so I played Richman, played Koei’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms II, and Han-Tang’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms I, making lots of money in the virtual world and numbing my youth.
After that I was hanging around in Beijing. Using Gametool, Gameboy(?), and FPE, I played countless games. Of course FPE was the most useful—for example, after changing the money value in The Legend of Sword and Fairy, Li Xiaoyao could use “Throwing Money Attack” on any NPC he met, which felt fantastic. But there were also games FPE couldn’t handle, such as one and two in the Legend of Kyrandia series, Hand of Fate, and later number three, Malcolm’s Revenge. Those belonged to the puzzle-type action game (ACT) category, so brute force with FPE wouldn’t work; I had no choice but to use my brain and make sharp turns in thinking. But often I could be completely stuck for several days, which was very painful. The more painful it was, the more I played; the more I played, the more painful it got, until it became a bit like S/M—so I can say that it was through computer games that I became deep.
There was one winter, in a little shabby room near Zhongguancun. I played Koei’s Genghis Khan: Blue Wolf and White Deer for two days and three nights straight. At that time, because work was not going well, I felt pretty bored. So I didn’t use FPE, and instead let my Genghis Khan once again slowly, painstakingly, “truly” conquer the whole world. After finishing a Koei game, the ending screens were generally made rather simply, and besides I had already seen them many times before, so I turned off the computer and stiffly walked out of the room.
Outside, a heavy snow had already fallen. Snow and mud were mixed together on the ground, very dirty. I looked all around for a breakfast stand, dragging my exhausted body from this side of the road to the other. While crossing the pedestrian overpass, I was very tired, and for the first time I felt that I was old.
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Wheatfield 62
Around 1984 or so, the city held a science and technology fair at the Cultural Palace. It was there that I first saw a personal computer. Looking back now, it should have been an Apple II computer. At the time, that model had entered mainland China and was then quickly copied in large numbers. Apple felt its intellectual property rights were being infringed upon, so not long after, it pulled out of this market entirely. Ten years later, compared with Microsoft, I think proud Apple must have regretted the pride it had back then.
At that fair, the computer was running a “ping-pong” game, and that made me, seeing a computer for the first time, very curious. Because at the time, I happened to especially like playing table tennis, and I was pretty good at it too. So I stood in a very long line to give it a try—I was fully convinced that however I normally played ping-pong, I could just play it the same way here. Of course that was not the case. In front of the keyboard I was completely at a loss, using one finger after another to look for my “paddle” and the directions, and very quickly I was defeated.
After coming back from the fair, I couldn’t stop thinking about that fun “black box.” So I kept pestering my father, wanting to see the computers at their design institute. After a lot of effort I finally got to see them, and was very disappointed: cold data was jumping on the screen, not “ping-pong.” Of course now I know that what they had there was a minicomputer system and terminals, which had nothing at all to do with personal computers.
But by coincidence, one of my aunts was then studying a computer-related major at a university. One weekend, when she came to my house for a meal, she heard about my curiosity toward computers and said that she and a few classmates were preparing to run a computer training class, and told me to come listen too. I asked: can the computers there play “ping-pong”? She said yes, and they could even draw the “Mona Lisa.” Of course now I also know that the so-called computer-drawn “Mona Lisa” back then just meant that if you stood 2 meters away and looked at the little pinholes printed by a dot-matrix printer, and kind of fooled yourself a bit, then it became the “Mona Lisa.”
Another weekend, I ran off to the university to take a computer class. Generally speaking, computer training in China followed two paths: one was to start by learning BASIC, and once you learned to program in BASIC and could make the computer recite 3.1415926......, then you counted as a programmer; the other path was to start by learning binary, discrete mathematics, computer architecture, and assembly, and once you learned to call various interrupts, then you counted as a senior programmer. The training class my aunt and the others were running took the latter path, so on the first day of class, let alone the “Mona Lisa,” I didn’t even see the shadow of “ping-pong”—I awkwardly did base conversions on my ten fingers. Later I took off my shoes and used my toes too, and still couldn’t make sense of it.
I didn’t dare go a second time. Because if I went again, I really didn’t know what else I’d have to take off. And just like that, a young boy’s computer dream went out.
Then I went to university. The computer teacher was a Manchu, surnamed “Na,” and he taught us BASIC. He was mean-spirited, and had a very bad reputation among the students, so we called him “that B.” Once in his class, we forgot to erase the blackboard, and that B got very angry, stiffened his neck, and said: today I was supposed to start teaching you “Operating Systems,” but now I’m really not going to teach it. You’ll study it yourselves, and this part will count for 15% of the final exam. That B really kept his word. After that he skipped that whole section all the way to the end of the term. That left me dumbfounded. I had no choice but to go to the library, without even knowing what books I ought to read, and in that muddle my DOS era truly began.
In university, generally speaking, things still followed that second path I mentioned above. This time I understood binary, but for the life of me I still couldn’t understand why data had to be put into all those registers, so in the assembly language exam I only got a little over ten points (that is, I got all the binary-conversion questions right, and everything else wrong). On the makeup exam, though, I somehow passed. I say “somehow” because after I started working, for a period of time I wanted to learn assembly again. I picked up the textbook and found that I still only understood that binary part, and absolutely nothing else. In anger I threw the book down and made a vicious oath: TMD, in the future I absolutely must make my son learn assembly well and vent this for me! But only now, assembly language has basically already been eliminated—so life really is full of regrets.
In university, I often had machine time. The machine specs were PC AT, so this makes me quite proud now—I’ve used every kind of machine from PC XT/AT, 286, 386, 486, Pentium, PⅡ, PⅢ, and if you count that “Apple II” I mentioned earlier, then I basically count as having witnessed the development history of personal computers. To get back to using the machines, there was one particularly funny thing: once, Jiao XX from my dorm ran an astrology-sign program. The computer room was very quiet at the time. After he got it debugged successfully, he suddenly shouted excitedly: I’m a virgin! I’m a virgin!! We were startled for a moment, then burst into laughter. Later “I fuck! I’m a virgin!” became a class fad for a while, just like how “I write! I’m a beautiful woman writer!” is popular now—both have that “I think, therefore I am” kind of self-confident tone.
After taking more than a dozen computer-related courses, I graduated and was assigned to some government office. I put my studies to practical use, beginning to specialize in computer games, while also typing in WPS under the Founder Chinese card. My work was highly effective: I helped the leaders get “Beautiful Women Mahjong” running, and printed quite a few summaries, reports, plans, speech outlines, and so on—beautifully typeset, with typo rates controlled to around 1%, and the mistakes were all homophones, so the leaders wouldn’t be embarrassed when giving speeches. The leaders patted me on the shoulder and said: not bad, young man, worthy of being a graduate from a famous university. I was very happy to hear that. And when I was happy, I’d look again at those image floppies a buddy had copied for me—that was what you call “great” days! It’s just a pity I had no money, so I played Richman, played Koei’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms II, and Han-Tang’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms I, making lots of money in the virtual world and numbing my youth.
After that I was hanging around in Beijing. Using Gametool, Gameboy(?), and FPE, I played countless games. Of course FPE was the most useful—for example, after changing the money value in The Legend of Sword and Fairy, Li Xiaoyao could use “Throwing Money Attack” on any NPC he met, which felt fantastic. But there were also games FPE couldn’t handle, such as one and two in the Legend of Kyrandia series, Hand of Fate, and later number three, Malcolm’s Revenge. Those belonged to the puzzle-type action game (ACT) category, so brute force with FPE wouldn’t work; I had no choice but to use my brain and make sharp turns in thinking. But often I could be completely stuck for several days, which was very painful. The more painful it was, the more I played; the more I played, the more painful it got, until it became a bit like S/M—so I can say that it was through computer games that I became deep.
There was one winter, in a little shabby room near Zhongguancun. I played Koei’s Genghis Khan: Blue Wolf and White Deer for two days and three nights straight. At that time, because work was not going well, I felt pretty bored. So I didn’t use FPE, and instead let my Genghis Khan once again slowly, painstakingly, “truly” conquer the whole world. After finishing a Koei game, the ending screens were generally made rather simply, and besides I had already seen them many times before, so I turned off the computer and stiffly walked out of the room.
Outside, a heavy snow had already fallen. Snow and mud were mixed together on the ground, very dirty. I looked all around for a breakfast stand, dragging my exhausted body from this side of the road to the other. While crossing the pedestrian overpass, I was very tired, and for the first time I felt that I was old.
我完全同意设想建立DOS组织“DOS联盟” ，也就是说和Wengier、以及“起步”站长莫老师等DOS战友一起来建立这个“DOS联盟”，以发展我国自主OS（操作系统）的高度去完成我们共同的愿望。
------党委书记
------党委书记