Wednesday, December 16, 2009

My journey with technology

Recently some of tweeple junta was putting forward their views about windows 7. I was thinking how quickly technology is changing. It has been 10 years since I started using a desktop computer. It was during my first year of engineering (1999) when I first hold the mouse. It was a Windows 95 operating system. Starting few months we didn't go to computer centre due to ragging. So only after diwali I used computers. My classmate Avinash shaw helped me to create my first e-mail id on yahoo. It took around 1 hr as net speed was too slow at that time. Though majority of students learned basic of computers during their school but our case was different. Most of Rajasthan board Hindi medium students saw PC in Engg College only.
Both Windows 95 and Windows 98 were used along with unix also. During my four year stint in Engg College I saw many OS like windows millennia edition, windows 2000, Windows NT but I liked windows 98 most. We also used Netscape navigator for browsing purpose also, probably it's not used today. There were few students in my class, who knows in and out of OS and PC very well. In fact those guys helped a lot to maintain our department lab and computer centre.
During second year we became addicted to chatting. Yahoo chat room was commonly used among students. My friend Gaurav goyal (naam rashi :) was the guy who spent time on chatting more than any of us. We made many fake profiles and entered in different-2 chat room. It was good experience. Chatting with friends happened after college only as my other friends were not in touch with computers.
By the time we entered in third year, a few of my friends bought personal computer in hostel rooms. We didn't have LAN in hostel at that time so computer were used to watch movies only. We used to see movie in group with lot of hulla gulla. Slowly-2 people shifted to Windows XP as we are mastered in copying the OS without paying. If I am correct, XP ran quite longer time compare to other previous OS. At the end of third year (2001-02), mobile services started in jaipur by BSNL. A few of my friends bought mobile phone in final year and most common use of mobile were SMSing as initially BSNL kept SMS free and call rates were exorbitantly high. Due to this free SMS and congestion, if someone sent a SMS - 'coming for lunch' that used to deliver after finishing the lunch. Due to this problem they started charging SMS. Digital cameras were also not common at that time, so most of friends have that reel based camera.
In my company I used laptop (HP-Compaq) first time and bought my first mobile in Dec 2003. After college, social networking sites became new theme. I joined orkut quite late as internet uses were restricted in my organization. Due to non-availability of softcopy of my college day's pics I couldn't upload those pics on orkut. It's quite tough to connect all of your batch mates after college. I have connected many of my class mates but still some are off the radar. Suddenly yahoo chat disappeared and gmail rocked the world.
A rapid change has happened during last one and half year in IIMK. I addicted to twitter and facebook. Made profile on number of social networking sites. Working on Windows vista on my own laptop though I found vista is worst OS so far. It's going to be exciting as technology changing at very fast rate. I will try to keep abreast of latest technology now on.