XT Kids

1.2 The Laboratory

1.2 The Laboratory

The lab sat at the end of a second-floor corridor, apart from the other classrooms. Heavy door, a small glass pane that fogged up every morning. Shoes came off at the entrance, lined up on a wooden rack that never had enough room. Talk too loud inside, and the lab assistant would find you with a look that ended the conversation.

Bayu always came early — not out of diligence, but to catch the room before it filled, the machines still dark and silent, before the clatter of keyboards took over.

It was the only air-conditioned room on that side of campus, and not for the students’ sake. The cooling kept the machines from overheating. More than one student joked that the computers got better treatment than the people using them.

Twelve XT units stood in two neat rows, each with a monochrome monitor, a keyboard that clicked hard under every stroke, a cream-colored case that hummed when switched on. Cables ran under the desks like tangled roots. None of the machines talked to each other — no network, no printer at every station, just two shared dot-matrix printers at the back of the room and a line that could stretch to the door.

Pak Slamet ran the lab: thin, thick-glassed, patient in a way that rarely included smiling. He’d lean over a shoulder, glance at a screen, offer three words, and move on.

“Try again.”

“Watch the semicolon.”

“Wrong command.”

He never fixed a mistake for anyone. He pointed, and walked away, and let the student sit with it.

Bayu sat in the same seat every session — third desk from the door, second row — a spot he’d claimed without anyone assigning it. Hanief and Arif had their own lab times, different faculties, different schedules; Bayu came home each week with a new story that, without his noticing, was starting to plant itself in both of them.

The girl at the next desk carried a blue folder stuffed with tidy notes. They rarely spoke — an eraser passed back and forth, a typo pointed out in someone’s code.

That day, Pak Slamet wrote a short BASIC problem on the board: calculate the area of a triangle from a base and a height the user types in. A few students groaned. Most just copied the board word for word, thinking about lunch.

Bayu read the problem twice before he touched the keyboard. He wanted to know what was actually happening behind the glass — how a number became a result, how a box of metal and wire could “understand” anything he typed at all.

10 INPUT "Enter the base:", A

20 INPUT "Enter the height:", T

30 AREA = 0.5 * A * T

40 PRINT "The area of the triangle is:"; AREA

He pressed RUN. The cursor dropped to a new line.

Enter the base:

He typed a number. Enter.

Enter the height:

Another number.

The area of the triangle is: 24

He sat there a beat too long, looking at a number anyone could have gotten with a calculator in five seconds. It wasn’t the number. It was that he’d written a command and a machine with no feelings, no thoughts of its own, had done exactly what he’d asked — no more, no less. Unlike people, who promised one thing and did another, this thing simply obeyed.

“Finished already?” the girl beside him asked.

He nodded, still somewhere else.

“You look… really serious about this,” she said, laughing a little.

He smiled and didn’t know what to say. How do you explain that a triangle’s area just made you feel something you can’t name?

Around the room, most students were already done, chatting quietly or doodling, waiting out the clock. To them this was a two-credit box to check before they went back to soil science, livestock anatomy, contract law — whatever they considered their real subject.

Bayu looked at the green screen a moment longer. He didn’t know why it felt different to him. He only knew that every time he left this room, a small question came with him: What if the command were bigger? What if this machine could do something that used to take a person hours?

He had no answer yet. Only the cursor, blinking, waiting.

When the session ended, Pak Slamet killed the machines one by one and made sure every screen had gone dark before he’d let anyone touch the door. Students filed out, retrieved their shoes, went back to talking about lunch and the weekend.

Bayu left last, and looked back once. The screens that had glowed minutes ago were just dark glass now, catching the hallway light.

But in his head, the screen was still on. ### 1.3 The First XT

The house was down a small alley not far from campus — close enough for students too lazy to flag an angkot. Modest, to put it kindly: paint peeling in patches, a tile roof that rattled in the rain, a front yard just wide enough for two motorbikes. To Bayu, Hanief, and Arif, it looked like a palace.

The front room would become the rental space. The three bedrooms behind it would go to boarders. Solid plan, on paper. What they didn’t have was a computer.

That was where the trouble started.

An XT unit cost more than three students living off monthly allowances could easily justify. They scraped together what they had. Arif sold his old motorbike — “Physics says every object needs a push to start moving,” he said, half joking. Hanief borrowed from his older brother in Kediri, promising to pay it back once the shop opened. Even combined, it fell short of a new machine.

A senior on campus gave them a name. “Try Pak Surya’s shop. He sometimes has used units, reconditioned ones. Price is negotiable.”

The shop sat in a small storefront downtown, unremarkable — a few computers behind a dusty window, a plain sign: SURYA COMPUTER SHOP. Bayu, Hanief, and Arif went together, dressed as neatly as they could manage, doing their best to look like they belonged there.

Pak Surya was in his forties, hair going gray at the temples, a screwdriver permanently tucked in his shirt pocket like he might need it any second. He listened to their pitch without much comment — a nod here, a longer look there, weighing something he didn’t say out loud.

“A computer rental near campus,” he said finally. Half question, half conclusion.

“That’s right, sir,” Bayu said.

“Tight on capital?”

They exchanged a glance. “You could say that, sir,” Hanief admitted.

Pak Surya’s smile wasn’t mocking. It was the smile of someone who remembered standing exactly where they stood.

He led them to the back, to a shelf that didn’t make it to the front window — an XT unit, its casing a little dulled, a few scratches on top.

“Reconditioned. From an office that shut down. Motherboard’s fine, monitor’s clear. Ran it all night, no problems.” He named a price — still more than they’d brought, but within reach of the new-unit number they’d been dreading.

Bayu felt his pulse pick up.

They stepped outside to confer, huddled under a thin patch of shade, counting what they’d brought, arguing about what they could still cut.

“If we add next month’s rent money,” Arif said, “it’s close. But we’d be living tight for a while.”

Hanief sighed. “We’ve been over this a hundred times. If not now, when?”

Bayu looked back through the open door at the XT’s silhouette. He thought about the green screen in the lab, the strange honesty of a machine that did exactly what it was told, the question that had been following him since that evening outside the lecturer’s rental shop.

“Let’s take it.”

No cheering, no movie moment. Just three quiet nods — courage more than conviction.

Pak Surya barely haggled. He even knocked a little off the price without being asked, and added a condition none of them expected.

“Anything goes wrong, bring it back. I’ll fix it, no charge up front. Once the business is running, we’ll settle up.”

Bayu tried to read the reason behind that kindness. Pak Surya seemed to catch the question before he asked it.

“I was you three, once,” he said, and went back to bundling cables for them to take home.

They carried the computer home by angkot that afternoon — Hanief with the monitor on his lap, Arif gripping the system unit like it might slip, Bayu guarding the bag of cables and manuals. Other passengers watched three students haul a “strange object” most of them had never seen up close.

At home, they set it on a plain wooden table a local carpenter had built for them, in a front room still otherwise empty.

That night, after checking every cable twice, Bayu switched it on for the first time in the house that was now, officially, theirs.

The screen flickered. Went dark. Then, slowly, the green glow he already knew by heart.

Starting…

The cursor blinked, waiting.

The three of them stood there a moment, watching a secondhand office computer as if it were something much larger than itself.

Outside, Malang was settling into the night mist. Inside, the green screen lit three faces — animal husbandry, agriculture, physics — three young men who had just placed the first bet of a journey none of them could see the end of yet.