Malcom X's "Learning to Read"

        I found this story of Malcom X's quite interesting. I have to say that it would take a whole lot of time and  dedication to copy the whole dictionary. I do think that the way Malcom X dedicated himself to learning the way he did is amazing. The accomplishment I achieved in the story below is definitely a life changing experience that I will never forget and will always have great pride in. I have never spent that amount of time trying to self educate myself. However, I did spend about four to five hundred hours learning how to get a computer up and running that a friend gave me with all of the hardware in it besides the hard drive. The hard part was the computer did not come with any software.  This is where my real love for computers really started to take off. Of course this was back in 1997 when AOL first got going, I had to do a lot of researching to figure out how the World Wide Web worked. I did not have that much experience with computers other than playing games, loading and saving file, word processing, creating very simple programs to do very simple tasks, and use Prodigy Internet. I had to read the MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 user manuals pretty much all the way through a couple of time each. That was just to gain the knowledge of how the operating system (OS) communicates with the hardware and the proper way to install the software so the computer would run smoothly. Back in that day it was very important to load the proper software first and take the appropriate steps to configure the software to your OS once you have the software installed to your hard drive. I had to take the computer apart and get the manufacturers name and model number off each of the hardware components so I could find the proper software to load into the computer so the OS could communicate with the hardware. Each piece of hardware has it's own software. At that time that included the sound card and Cd-Rom drive which worked together as a multimedia unit. I also had to have the software drivers for the printer, touch screen attachment for the monitor, and the scanner. I was able to locate most of the proper drivers off the World Wide Web. The two software drivers for the multimedia package were a close match, but they did not input the correct commands into the config.sys and the autoexec.bat files. I called the manufacturers’ for the Cd-Rom and the sound card and learned the correct commands to input into the OS to make the drivers work with the hardware. This is when I read the books for the second time. This is how I learned how to access the config.sys and autoexec.bat files and how to correctly modify these files so they work properly. After all of my dedication and hard work, I had the computer up and running by myself. Every part of it worked and it worked very well for its day and age. I tell you this, touch screen technology sure has came a far way since the mid nineties. This is why I decided to go to school for my A.A.S in Computer Information Technology.