Help

We can always tap the help command when we are in trouble…

- Arun Kumar Natha

In the early 1990s, I had joined a three-semester computer diploma course. Desktop computers were a very new thing at that time and the computers were kept in an airconditioned environment and had to be handled very carefully. I was fascinated with using the computer and learning something from it.

The course was a combination of classroom and lab sessions. For every new module in, let's say learning a programming language, we had to learn the theory in the classroom first which was followed by a few exercises which we had to practice in the computer lab. I would be very excited to go to the computer lab to experiment with what I had learnt from the classroom sessions.

Strangely enough, when I worked in the lab I used to get stuck while writing the program as I could not recollect the theory part that I had learnt in the classroom. I used to spend a lot of time trying to troubleshoot by recollecting the code. I had an extraordinary computer coach who used to always tell us to use the Help command anytime we got stuck during programming. The Help command was inbuilt in the programming language and could answer any frequent query relating to a particular topic. All I needed to do was to use that Help command along with the aspect where I needed help.