ABSTRACT
My very first experience of personal computing dates back to the early 1990s at home in Hong Kong, when I was still a high school student. I remember the first thing I did on the computer was play a card game called Solitaire. At that time, I had to share a desktop computer at home with my two younger brothers. After a few years, we also had an internet connection, but I did not take much notice of it. I remember it was my brothers who were always typing something on a black screen, but I had no idea what exactly they were doing. I was, however, sure that they were typing something in English, which was quite strange to me as they rarely used English (except for school work). They later told me that they had been communicating and exchanging files with people from other parts of the
world through a bulletin board system (BBS). I was very impressed with what they could do, but I had no intention of learning more about it because I only used the computer occasionally to format my assignments. (Typing up homework was still optional then, but I thought a word-processed piece would make a better impression!)
One day a high school friend who had moved to Australia asked me if I had an “email address” as she would like to write me an “email” – a completely new idea to me. With some help from my brothers, I finally managed to write and send my very first email. It took me a whole afternoon to compose it. I typed it in English because Chinese was almost impossible for me (processing nonalphanumeric characters was not easy then). That very long email, as I recall, closely resembled a formal business letter that I would have written for an English composition class!
