A Leaf From The History Book

Today as I waited for my office transportation in the morning, I got talking to a young lad waiting for his school bus with me at the gate of the building I live in. He was a student of class VII and for some reason was carrying a stack of CDs. When I enquired about it, he told me that it contained his course material and that everyone is supposed to carry these disks to the school as and when needed.

I am not sure if he spoke the truth. It sure looked like more than his course material (One of the CDs had Bipasha Basu on the label, who I am sure is not yet a part of the school curriculum). Anyway, so when I saw this stack in his hand my first reaction was to recall the flexible  5.25” diskettes that I used to work on during my days at school.

During those days, the subject matter of computer sciences was fairly simple as well. PL-Logo to get initiated, basic DOS commands, block diagram of the computer and a few odd things about operating systems and file based systems and that was it. Later the new operating system Windows 3.11 was the talk of the town. Only a few lucky ones could afford to buy a desktop and then those who had them at home (inherited from their parents) were really not allowed to touch them except under guided supervision.

I was reminded of the day when I bought my first desktop and it did not happen before I had passed high school. My first desktop computer was then the best possible configuration and a state of the art machine in its own right. It boasted of a Pentium II processor (566 MHz) when Pentium I was still considered a luxury. It had a single 8 GB hard disk and 128 MB RAM chip and ran the latest Windows 98 operating system. Almost everyone who I knew and had some basic knowledge of computer hardware asked me with raised eyebrows and a hint of envy in the voice as why I needed such an advanced system and what would I do with so much of disk space.

I had spent an obscene amount of money and then the expenses kept mounting as I kept exploring the hardware. Opening the CPU cabinet and dissembling and assembling the entire system used to be one of my favorite games that time. I was invited by friends to configure their machines and load software applications (mostly games, songs and freeware). The Internet was virtually unheard of and I was in fact the first ones in my friend circle to create an email ID and be versed with the actual usage of the net (apart from being the unlimited source of dirty pictures). Sigh!!! Those were the days.

Someday in few years from now, I guess the coming generation would refuse to acknowledge the fact that man once walked the face of this Earth without a cell phone in his pocket or without being connected to the Internet 24X7 via laptops or palmtops.

I am sure my children would not believe me if I would tell then that people used to wait an entire week to catch one movie every Sunday evening on the national network and would even care to watch programs like ‘Krishi Darshan’ before their weekly dose of 5 primitive film songs on ‘Chitrahaar’ and ‘Saptahiki’ was the only TV guide available. People would fail to recall how black and white TVs looked like, the wooden frame and shutter on the TV sets are already a thing of past. In fact the way LCD, Plasmas and now the LED TVs are taking over, the normal CRTs might also be an article for museums 10 – 15 years down the line.

I already feel like the bicentennial man or a chapter from the history books. And to think of it things that I am talking about are not even two decades old (as of now). Whew…time sure has flied and the progress in media and technology has been stupefying.

Sometimes I do feel that the rhythm of life has been disrupted by all this blitzkrieg advancement. I would still love to laze around on Sunday afternoons and bask in sunshine on winters with nothing to do but read or paint or just lie about getting wasted in a TV and Internet free world.

I guess I shall dedicate a separate post on things that I would want again in life. For now, I shall just retire to my bedroom and put on a DVD and watch some crappy old Hindi movie from 50s. My russet being recoils in the history I just wove around myself. As for my fellow yellow leaves from the same age, close your eyes and smell an old book. Let the nostalgia fill your lungs and draw you away from this crazy world of conveniences and comforts and gizmos and gadgets and weaning integrity and thinning morals.

Good Night.