Gaining Insights from Digital Technology

Incidentally, the school I applied to enter didn't have Computer Engineering, but a Computer Science degree instead. "Well, it has the word "Computer" in it, so it can't be much different anyway," so I thought.

Let's just say that I made the right decision for the wrong reason. My first experience with computers was when we had to use punch cards on a remote mainframe. Then we had Digital VAX machines that used Teletype-like terminals. I remember when we had to write a program, we used to reserve a time slot (usually at night) to submit batch jobs.

Then it was a waiting game, sometimes overnight, before we get back a tiny syntax error telling us that the program wouldn't be compiled.

In my junior and senior years, I had the interactive Terak 8510 microcomputer to work with. This Arizona-made wonder used an 8-inch floppy disk, and ran a menu-driven UCSD p-System OS but had the ability for graphics output. The language of choice was UCSD Pascal.

After graduation, I spent a few months as part of a team developing an emulation program between a Burroughs (later a part of Unisys) minicomputer and the Apple III. I was lucky enough to play around with the elusive Apple Lisa (a precursor to the Mac) with all the trappings of the future - a built-in hard drive, GUI, 3.5" floppy disk and a mouse - that was in 1983.

I am a late bloomer when it comes to owning a computer. The wide variety of machines I had used before belonged to school or work places, so the first machine that I could call my own was a Compaq 386SX that I bought in the early 90s.

The Fascination of Digitalism

Sometimes I am astonished that I am still in the IT industry after two decades in the field. I have never considered myself a "technical" or a "scientific" person. During my four-year stint as a computer science student, I had bouts of reservation about my career choice, and at one time I was strongly considering dropping out of the programme entirely.

This is because I have been "blessed" (or "cursed") with a wide range of interests. The small liberal arts college that I attended provided a hypermarket of knowledge that seemed to propel my curiosity even more.

It had an interesting requirement that all students should expand their knowledge as diversely as possible. All subjects were grouped into one of three categories - natural science, social science and arts.

If you majored in a subject under one category, you had to choose a "concentration" subject from one of the other two categories, along with a workload that was almost as demanding as the major.

Once you have chosen the subject for "concentration," you must also select a "distribution" subject from the last category. This is not to mention that every student also had to pass a semester-worth of a foreign language and take religion courses before they could get their degree - regardless of their major.

I majored in computer science, which grouped me in the natural science category. My "minor" subject was considered to be a little weird for a Comp-Sci. major - Fine Arts, while my "distribution" subject was Political Science/History.

From this diversity, I slowly started to feel there was something "magical" about computer technology. For example, in my junior year, we had to do an IS (Independent Study - which is similar to post-graduate thesis, but just a little less strenuous.)

I explored the fusion between computers and the Arts by creating a Backus-Naur Form (BNF) of "Blaise" language. The BNF is a "meta-language" that describes a property of another language, which used to develop a parser or compiler.

I named my theoretical language in honour of 17th Century mathematician Blaise Pascal, in which his name reflects Niklaus Wirth's famous programming language I used to create Blaise. Blaise is the language that programmers could use to create images by instructing a virtual "pencil" to draw figures on the screen.

In my senior year thesis, I pushed the envelope a little further by developing software that turned hand-drawn images from a "digitizer tablet" (as it was called then) into computer images. I included a feature that transformed graphics images into mathematical formulae, and created an algorithm that animated images on the Terak.

This was the time before the IBM PC or Mac came along. It was the time when a hard copy of "computer art" was a re-arranged text printout on large fan-fold paper.

As part of my thesis defence, I invited my fine arts professor for a demonstration. As she looked around the room full of Terak machines and DEC terminals, she remarked, "This is the first time I have ever been in a computer lab!"

That statement was perhaps the harbinger of what I found fascinating about digital technology. To put it simply, the computer is a vehicle that brings me to explore - in more ways than one - my broad interests. At first I didn't find any excitement in wiring a flip-flop circuit, or in designing the BNF of a computer language.

But now, as I look deeper into the mechanism of digitalism, I am starting to see how digital technology can blur the lines. It is a science that can also be an "art form." It is the artificial entities that we create which inspire us with the wonder of human nature.

Not now, but in the future, we may see more similarities between microprocessor switches and synapses in our brains. That day, when we look at a computer, we won't be seeing a "heartless" machine. Instead, we'll start seeing an extension of ourselves.