In the early 1990s, a small industrial town’s school added a computer lab equipped with IBM PC compatibles, a rarity for the era. The machines ran MS-DOS from 5¼‑inch floppy disks and displayed monochrome graphics. Limited to two hours per month, students like Susam Pal discovered programming through LOGO, tracing turtle graphics on paper before testing on the actual hardware.

The lab’s scarcity forced a DIY workflow: programs were handwritten, saved in notebooks, and re‑entered each session. A house drawing with animated dashes became a communal project, spreading like early open‑source code via pencil‑to‑paper copies. Occasional game time introduced titles such as MoonBugs, Space Invaders, and Grand Prix Circuit, showing how simple 2‑D code could hint at 3‑D worlds.

Decades later, Pal recalls the buzzing POST beeps and the cool, conditioned air as sensory anchors to those formative moments. Those fleeting sessions laid a foundation for lifelong curiosity, proving that even minimal exposure to computing can ignite lasting technical passion.