Monitors, mice and memories: the story of our first computer lab

Long before classrooms glowed with the blue light of LCD screens and laptops sat in every backpack, the very idea of a computer at Baranagore Ramakrishna Mission Ashrama High School felt like science fiction. There was a time when the school was defined by chalk, slate, ink wells and the steady hum of a ceiling fan overhead. Then one winter, a small group of teachers and well-wishers began whispering about something almost unthinkable — a dedicated room filled with machines that could calculate, store and even teach.

Those conversations eventually became bricks and wires. The first computer lab at the Ashrama High School opened in the late 1980s, and for the boys and girls who walked through its door, the experience was nothing short of life changing. The story of how it came to be, what filled its desks, and what happened to the students who learned inside it is a thread that still connects generations of alumni today, from the banks of the Hooghly to suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne where many former pupils now live.

A dream born in a staff room

The push for the lab began not with a grand donation but with a quiet argument among teachers. The mathematics master, fresh from a summer course at a regional science institute, kept insisting that students needed to touch a keyboard before they left school. The headmaster, a man who still preferred his long-handled wooden pointer to any electronic device, listened politely for nearly a year before agreeing to a trial.

A committee was formed, and the search for funding began in earnest. Parents contributed what they could, often in small monthly instalments that added up to something meaningful. Old students, some working as junior clerks in Kolkata and a few already settled abroad in places as far apart as Perth and Brisbane, sent letters with cheques folded inside greeting cards. The Ashrama's parent body, used to organising medical camps and book drives, treated the lab project with the same patient determination it brought to its charitable work.

By the end of the second year of fundraising, the committee had enough to purchase a modest fleet of machines. There were no glossy brochures or bulk discounts back then. The order was placed through a local dealer, paid for in cash for the most part, and the equipment was loaded onto a goods train at Howrah before being unloaded onto a hand-cart near the school gate. The day the crates arrived, half the senior students turned up after class just to look at the wooden boxes.

The day the machines switched on

When the room was finally ready, it looked nothing like the sterile labs of today. The computers sat in long rows on freshly built wooden tables, each one paired with a simple plastic chair. Windows of the operating system had not yet become the default; the machines booted straight into a green or amber screen where a blinking cursor waited patiently for instructions. The lab's pride was a single dot-matrix printer, which sounded like a small machine gun whenever a long document was sent to it.

Cooling was a serious concern. The school invested in extra ceiling fans and asked the electrician to install dedicated power lines, a small infrastructure project in its own right. Even with these precautions, classes had to be staggered so that not every machine was on at once, because the building's wiring would protest otherwise. Each student was given a printed booklet that explained how to switch on the computer, log in with a numbered username, and shut it down without pulling the plug.

The school also leaned on visiting experts. A young programmer from a Kolkata software firm volunteered his Saturdays to teach the first batch of students BASIC programming. He had recently returned from a project in Adelaide and used stories of Australian research laboratories, where computers were already being used to model weather patterns across the continent, to keep his young audience wide-eyed and attentive. Those sessions, more than any textbook, gave the lab its soul.

Learning to code before the world wide web

The first curriculum taught in the lab was simple but effective. Students learned to type by retyping paragraphs of Bengali and English prose, calculated sums in spreadsheets that took nearly a minute to recalculate, and wrote small programs that drew geometric shapes or printed the multiplication table. There was no internet, no email, no search engine, and no social media — the closest thing to a network was the printer queue.

For a few students, that early exposure became a career. Alumni who went on to study engineering or computer applications often traced their decision back to afternoons spent in that room. One former pupil, who now runs a small data analytics firm in Melbourne, has said in interviews that his first loop of code was written on a school machine whose hard drive could not have held a single photograph by today's standards. Another, settled in Sydney, credits the lab with teaching him the patience required to debug any system, including the household ones he still tinkers with on weekends.

The lab was also quietly radical in its inclusion. Unlike many elite schools of that era, the Ashrama High School admitted children from a wide range of backgrounds, and the computer room became one of the few places where a farmer's son and a bank manager's daughter sat at adjacent terminals, equally baffled and equally thrilled. That spirit of equality in front of the machine has become part of the alumni folklore, retold at every reunion gathering.

Across oceans and time zones

The reach of that first lab now stretches well beyond Baranagar. Former students who migrated to Australia in the 1990s and 2000s often describe the school computer room as the moment they first imagined themselves working with technology for a living. In Melbourne and Sydney especially, small groups of alumni meet regularly over flat whites and samosas, and the conversation frequently turns to the same few machines, the same cramped room, and the same kindly tutor who taught them what a variable was.

Their children, who now study in Australian schools where Digital Technologies is embedded in the national curriculum from the early years, sometimes find it hard to picture such a slow, careful beginning. A few alumni have responded by donating refurbished laptops back to the school, an unbroken circle of generosity that mirrors the original fundraising effort. Others have funded scholarships for current students who show a knack for programming, in the same quiet, dignified spirit that built the first lab.

These transnational links have become a quiet engine for the institution. Reunion events held in Australia often include a video call with current pupils in Baranagar, and the school regularly hosts returned alumni who bring their professional experience back to the classroom for a day. The lab, in this sense, became the founding infrastructure of a much wider network.

A quiet revolution inside the school

The arrival of the lab changed teaching across the school, not just inside the computer room. Mathematics teachers began asking students to verify their answers using spreadsheets. The Bengali literature teacher, a man who had previously resisted anything with a plug on it, started requesting typed handouts of poems. Even the school magazine, once handwritten and painstakingly illustrated with woodcut blocks, moved through a clumsy desktop publishing program that took a full weekend to format a single issue.

Outside the school, the lab became a quiet point of pride for the wider community. Parents who worked in local government offices would drop in on open days to see the machines, sometimes bringing neighbours and cousins. On at least one occasion, a visiting dignitary from a national educational body remarked that the school's modest lab held its own against far better-resourced institutions in bigger cities. The comment was reprinted in a regional newspaper and pinned to the staff room noticeboard for years.

The lab also reshaped the school's relationship with its own charitable mission. The committee that ran the Ashrama's study centre for underprivileged children began to think about how computing could be part of that work too, and within a few years, evening batches for neighbourhood students were being held in the same room. What started as a single lab for paying pupils quietly widened into a small public resource, used well beyond the official school day.

A living memory for the alumni community

Today, the original machines are long gone, replaced several times over by sleeker systems and, more recently, by portable devices. The room itself has been renovated and renamed, but a faded photograph of the first lab still hangs in the corridor outside the current computer facility. Every batch of students who passes it hears the same story from a senior teacher — how a handful of teachers, parents and alumni turned a daydream into a working lab, one donated chair at a time.

The alumni community has kept that memory alive in practical ways. Through the BRKM Reunion platform, former students have organised donations of refurbished equipment, contributed to the upkeep of the existing lab, and shared scanned photographs from those early days. Reunion gatherings often include a walk past the old room, a moment of silence for teachers who have passed, and a great deal of laughter about how slow everything used to be.

For an institution that has always balanced academic learning with social service — running study centres for underprivileged children, organising medical camps, and supporting meritorious students with scholarships — the computer lab was, in many ways, its first foray into equipping young people for a digital future. The story continues to be written by each generation that sits down at a new machine and discovers, as their predecessors once did, that this little box can do more than they ever imagined.