We did use slates in school and at home, I believe. Not e-slates, the good old ones. This was around 1960 and beyond. Then, we had our blackboards and chalk in school. We had exposure to some technology through the radio, fairly gargantuan in size, through the sixties and seventies, and I remember you needed to renew a licence to operate/use a radio at home.
We heard of a contraption called Skylab which was sent into space and the collapsed back on to the earth around 1977 or 78. There was a story that a Sardar had named his kid Skylab Singh after this lab. Around 1982, the Delhi Asiad, colour TV entered our lives, having given us our fill of the black and white variety for a few years before that. I watched all the early TV shows like Chitahaar and the weekly movie in B&W.
The floppy drive computer with 256k RAM and disks of 5 and 1/4 inch was what I first used in the US in 1986. This was state-of-the-art then. Apple was floundering, though it had a loyal band of followers. The IBM PC changed everything pretty fast. By 1989, we had an early version of the net at Clemson, USA, but India did not have any place connected then.
In 1991, I taught SPSS using DOS at XIMB. Then, a few years later, it changed to WINDOWS, and became a lot simpler to use. I actually wrote my first book in long hand at Kirloskar Institute. Now I can't imagine doing that. The floppy gave way to the hard disk, the DVD and the pen drive. Now my car runs only a USB/pen drive and does not have a CD player of the older type! And my collection of 200 audio cassettes is suddenly redundant. I recently discovered a karaoke system that plays Hindi music and you can sing along to, thanks to cousins at Pune. It's a lot of fun at parties and get-togethers, and saves you the bother of remembering lyrics.
Facebook came along, and I found friends who I did't know existed- or rather, where they existed. Before that were hotmail, yahoo, and google, introduced to me by various friends. I am thankful to them for introducing me to this blogger too,as it is so easy to communicate with the world at large- I am continuously amazed by some of my reader stats, which seem to span the globe from Maryland, USA to Kazakhstan. I would have had no way to reach out to so many people otherwise. And benefit from reading their thoughts online.
Another great experience with technology was when I published my autobiography online with pothi.com a couple of years ago. That's technology in a nutshell, as it affected my life.
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1 comment:
Th downside of technology to me are friends who are not really our friends, a memory of ours that seems to be shrinking (remember telephone numbers, any stats...all we need to remember is google and reach for the mobile). We are communicating less though we are more in touch, we are listening to a lot less music than we used to in the times of the LPs and the cassettes, and there is pretty little brain activity which is showing up in the world. Anything for the days of the letters, the radio. I miss the small things that we did with much care, the songs we remembered, the few things that meant a lot. I do feel like starting an Amish kind of a community where there is a balance between both worlds.
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