Today, in pursuit of Kitunguu, I met a former classmate with the intention of doing a collabo in some project am chasing. The sight of this guy brought back memories of an event that took place almost two decades ago.
The venue was Moi University (which was founded in 1985, and whose slogan is/was Foundation of Knowledge - cc
@Okiya). The faculty of Technology was newly founded and the lecturers were very committed to produce engineers with a difference (I must add that this was well on track and the first 10 lots of graduates, including yours truly, were fully baked), and thus were very serious with the quality of learning. Among the requirements for graduating was that you must present a working project,and this single project accounted for over 20% of the units for the final year. If you cracked the project, you were assured of a good grade in the final year.
I developed an early interest in computers, and before the turn of the millennium, I had convinced my old guy (God rest him in peace) to cough over 70k for me to buy parts and assemble a computer. Them days, assembling a computer was akin to performing a heart surgery. So I assembled myself a Pentium II running at 233MHz (but managed to over clock it to 300), 4GB harddisk and 32MB RAM. It also had a TV card and a VCD drive. Because I was taking a technical course, there's no way I could load it with Windows95. That was for ordinaries, and I wasn't. So my OS was Microsoft Windows NT 4.0. That was during my fourth year.
My classmate, who I met today, was my semi-roommate at Ngeria, Hall 2. For this Hekaya, I will call him
@Gio. The engineers (as we used to call ourselves) had the privilege of having individual rooms to themselves. Seems like originally, they were big rooms but they repartitioned later but the partition doesn't go all the way to the ceiling. So you could stand on your reading desk and peep when your neighbor is engaged in coitus with the many BA ladies who were ever throwing pussy towards Ngeria. My monster of a computer was ever in demand by desperate souls trying to type their projects. We were charging 200bob per hour, or 50bob per page if I type for you. Most guys were slow typists, therefore they preferred to give me the job of typing, then I load the MS Word 95 or WordPerfect 6.0 document into a 1.44MB floppy, the format depending on where the person intended to print the document. Most of you Omufarangas wa
@Meria can't relate when I tell you that we used to pay 50bob one way to go print a document in Eldoret town. Same thing if you wanted to browse the internet.
Gio saw a business opportunity and we agreed to collaborate and purchase a printer. So we got ourselves a HP LaserJet 1100 printer for 35K. We were now printing at 20bob per page, and we had to hire a person to do the typing and printing since business was booming. The barman (System hapo student center ya Ngeria) was the main beneficiary. The other one was Kadogo pale Mabatini and Wairimu at Kesses.
That marked the start of a wrong (sic) and painful friendship that saw us take a joint project in our fifth year.
Gio was taking Instrumentation Option, yours truly was into Software. So when the dean, Prof. PC Egau, announced that they are accepting submissions for projects, we decided that me and Gio would work to create the world's first ever Computer-Based Oscilloscope. He works on the hardware, I work on software. We submitted that proposal and PC Egau sat us down for a full hour trying to understand if we know the scope of work involved. We were determined to be the best, so we convinced him that we will deliver before time. He gave us the privilege of picking our supervisors. We settled for Kifaru and Kotpo Madara (may he RIP). We hit the ground running. Madara could not trust me to install Microsoft Visual Basic 6 properly, and he personally did it for me on my computer, in my room, complete with MSDN. I suspect he wanted to have a feel of a Pentium II, considering all the other computers in the university were 486s at best. He also did the same in one of the computers at the Lab, and instructed the lab guy to grant me unlimited access any time I needed to.
God bless his soul.
All went well. By the end of first sem, I had already developed the routines for manipulating data once received from Gio's circuit. Gio had also developed the data-capture hardware that could convert any signal within the range of 0.01v to 5KV into a stream of 16 bits (with parity control) and the same was held in a series of flip-flops clocked by a 555 timer at the maximum 2mhz possible then. But since we wanted to measure signals with a higher frequency, he was able (or rather convinced me) to make one circuit capable of digitizing all the way to 32mhz.
Second sem was where the real work was to happen. We were now working on connecting his circuit to my program through the serial port(there was no USB then). The fashionable term to use was
interfacing. We were at the top of the world. Whoever said the devil is uncircumcised is a liar. However hard we tried, the computer could not detect his hardware. After consultations with our supervisors, and endless nights of research at the state-of-the-art Margaret Thatcher Library (MTL), we realized that we had overlooked the small matter of an animal called
DRIVERS. For the slow ones like
@Mwalimu-G here, writing drivers was, and still is, among the hardest things to do. And VB6 was the most unsuitable application for this. Actually, it was, and still is, impossible to do that. A dispute arose on who is responsible for providing the drivers. He argued that this is a software task. I argued that this is the responsibility of the hardware provider. We consulted our collaboration agreement, and it was silent on that. Even the HOD, Dr. Ochol, and the mad Mathematics professor, Mr. Akwabi, could not arbitrate. We differed irreconcilably. The differences were too major, and even our typing and printing business had to be dissolved. We simply couldn't see each other. In fact, I had to move from my room to avoid having him as a neighbor. I hated that guy for letting me down. Am sure he hated me too for letting him down.
So the presentation date for the project saw us presenting individually, and pointing out that each persons part would work if only the other person had put due effort and delivered their part of the deal. Needless to say, the lecturers were gracious enough to give us 40% just so that we don't waste another year. That 40% costed me a first class honors. It also costed him a first class honors. We both missed by a single point, which we could have got if only we got 55% in the project. Worse still, it denied me an opportunity for a masters scholarship in the US of A. Fuack Gio.
So, today, we met at my boardroom with the intention of discussing collaboration on a project whose individual scopes is similar to the project we undertook almost 2 decades ago.
The meeting did not proceed beyond introductions.
