Evolution of computers as I have seen

My journey in the world of computers started back in the early 80's when I was about 7 years old. That was the time when an occupation related to computers was considered extremely rare and specialized. Among those few early birds of the time is my father. He used to work in a company called "XLO Machine Tools" and had been selected as a young and bright candidate to learn and adopt the new technology that would one day take the world by storm. I vaguely recall seeing him draw diagrams of boxes and lines on paper, which made me curious because they did not make any sense to me. When I asked him what he was working on, he responded saying that he was learning "programming". It was only several years later that I learnt those diagrams were flowcharts.

The first computer I saw was nothing like the PC, latptop, tablet or mobile we see today. The concept of a monitor or display as we see now did not exist. It was a huge machinery instrument that my father was working on in his office where I had accompanied him during a function for which families of employees had been invited. After every few minutes the "machine" used to throw out punch cards. A punch card looked something like the below image that I found on another blogger's page.

I did not understand anything about what those holes in the card meant. Apparently my father had printed my name in the form of a punch card. He did explain to me how the data was read, but I was too small a kid to remember those details for long. Nonetheless, I was very excited to have seen a "computer" for the first time in my life.

In about 3-5 years from that time, the technology of computers underwent a major transformation and my father was excited about being able to see the output of programming on a TV like component (CRT monitor). Back then, mostly computers were purchased only by corporates, since the culture of owning a personal computer (PC) was very rare in India. Though an early entrant in this field, my father's company wasn't doing very well, and the salary used to get delayed by 2-4 months. To sustain the financial needs of the family and combat the increasing job insecurity, he started working as a freelancer for an outstation client. He could only go there once a week on his weekly day off, worked on the client's computer for 6-8 hours and then had to rush back for the train to Mumbai so he could attend office the next day. This wasn't an easy task and getting a personal computer at home became an essential need. Thus, when I was about 11 years old, we bought a second hand assembled computer for Rs.13,000/- which was a hefty amount for that time

Since I did not understand what programming was at that time, the only use I made of it was for playing games - today's children are much more tech savvy than we were. The computer at that time did not have a hard disk. It just had one floppy drive, where we first had to start the computer and boot it using an MS-Dos boot disk, which used to bring up the command prompt. Once the OS was loaded into memory, we had to remove the boot disk and insert the games floppy. The games were all DOS based - some names I recall are Digger. Kong, Jumpjoe, Round42, Pacman. I was allowed to play games on the PC for some time daily, and that's what attracted me to the technology. One funny behavior our PC displayed was that sometimes it just wouldn't start, and I had discovered a "special"technique of slapping it a few times on the right side of the CPU cabinet, after which it seemed to obey my orders. Probably it was just some loose connections that used to fix themselves due to the vibrations from those slaps. Further the cabinet was slightly misfit in size for the motherboard and often one lock used to get stuck too tightly which made it difficult for hardware engineers to open the cabinet when a repair was needed. I was the only one who knew how to open it up in a minute, and took pride in doing so.

But games aside, the immediate target on hand was to recover the capital invested, and my father started taking computer classes at home for a fee of Rs. 300/- per student. He also started getting some local clients for freelancing and eventually entered into the profession full time since his company was anyway not paying salaries for months. The response was really good for a home based computer class, but higher income was needed.

By now I had some basic understanding of how computers and applications worked. So we took up a data entry assignment with a company that outsourced data entry jobs to people who had PCs at home. I cannot remember the name of the company now, but it was located at Mahim, Mumbai. They provided us the data entry application on a floppy disk that was to be personally collected from their office. We came home and started working on the program. In those days all that was needed to run a program was a compiled .com or .exe file along with a few library files in the same directory. No complex setup and installation procedures existed. We were paid Rs. 5 for a single form entry and could complete about 30 forms in a day - a decent amount in those days. No emails existed in India back then so data had to be personally carried back. In about a week, we had completed about 200 forms, after which we went back to deliver the data. Little did we know that we were just about to go through a scary experience, which I am sure most people would think as ridiculous and laugh at today when I narrate it. 😃

When we reached the data collection office, we handed over the floppy containing data to the Computer engineer at the reception. He went into the computer room to copy the data, but within a few minutes was back at the reception with a worried look. What he told us came as a completely unexpected surprise. He said the floppy that we had delivered contained a virus! Any guesses what our first reaction to that was? Well, we said we had kept our home computer and the data floppy in an area that was free from dirt and dust, and that we did not even wear shoes when entering our computer room. After all, we had only known about viruses in living beings and thought this had something to do with delivering a damaged floppy. But it seems we were not the only ones to think that way, since the engineer did not think we were stupid. Or perhaps he did, but it did not show on his face. He explained to us the concept of how computer viruses were actually malicious programs that stuck themselves to the memory of the computer and gradually sabotaged the functioning of the computer. He also showed us how their anti-virus program had caught the virus with the name C-brain and how he had cleaned the floppy. It seems the virus had slipped in though one of the game floppies that I had used. Luckily the data could be salvaged and thus we did not lose our payment. However, we had to call our hardware engineer to disinfect our computer and clean the floppy disks of the virus. And thus, we got acquainted with the terminology of computer virus!

I continued working with my father on computer applications and playing computer games. As time went by, games started becoming larger in size. The first floppy disk of 1.2 MB I had contained about 20 games. Then came the era of 1.44 MB floppy disks which could store 1.44 MB of data and was compact in size. It could hold about 2-3 more games.

Eventually applications and games started becoming heavier in size and could not fit into a single floppy. A utility called Pkzip and Pkunzip came to the rescue (later on evolved to Winzip that we know today). It could compress larger files or programs so they could fit on a floppy. But that was just not enough, and software manufacturers started shipping programs in multiple floppy disks. However this required frequent removal and insertion of multiple floppies in floppy drives, which was not just tedious but extremely damage prone. Even a single damaged floppy would render an entire set of floppies unusable.

Around the same time, hard disk drives entered the market, and that was a BIG revolution in the world of data storage. I used to play Doom 1 in those days and it required 5.1 MB of space to be installed and run. The first hard disk we bought for our PC was of 20 MB capacity and that was considered more than enough for a home PC. I was delighted to be able to play Doom by installing it on the PC. After this it was a constant and rapid growth in technology where CPU processing speeds, memory, and disk space size knew no bounds. We had to keep upgrading our home PC each year to keep pace with the growth. But every such upgrade was an investment since it provided means to achieve larger tasks at a faster rate.

After a few years, in 1995, when I was studying Second Year B.Com in Mulund College of Commerce, all students were called for a conference session conducted by veteran actor Shammi Kapoor. He had come to promote an emerging phenomenon called the internet in India. Shammi Kapoor was the founder and chairman of Internet Users Community of India (IUCI). Later on, he had also played a major role in setting up internet organizations like the Ethical Hackers Association. He spoke a lot about how technology had advanced so much that similar to people having conversations over telephone, data could now be transferred from one location to another electronically by a mechanism called email, and that Yahoo! (probably the only popular search engine of the time) was the means to search for any information on the internet. We were thrilled to learn such technology existed but at that time it seemed a technology as advanced and uncommon as Artificial Intelligence (AI) is to the general public today. Well, at least that was the state of technology in India and internet for common use still seemed like a distant dream.

I cleared my graduation in 1996 and after taking up a temporary job of a data entry operator in Godfrey Phillips and briefly working on Lotus 123, joined another company called Aireff deTox Inc. as a computer operator. I was thrilled to work on a new operating system with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) - Microsoft Windows 3.11. MS-office was in it's early days where Word, Excel and Powerpoint were miracles created by technology. I started learning these tools to use them in everyday work.

In those days when someone needed a printout in office, usually the printer was connected to one PC and people used to carry files to be printed on floppies from one desktop to another. A slightly advanced version of the process was copying files over LAN to a shared directory on the PC connected to the printer. I have seen people queuing up and also been in fights with my colleagues over whose printing tasks have priority over others. During this time I read in a PC magazine about the ability to share a printer over LAN. Our office already had a LAN setup, so the infrastructure was already present. I had all the support needed from a close friend and colleague, Sandeep Kocharekar to try things out and after several hours of trial and error we managed to fire a print command from one of the machines in the LAN network directly to the printer. Just being able to do that was considered a great achievement during those days.

Then came the time when our office first subscribed to an internet connection from Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) at a cost of Rs. 15000/- for 500 hours in a year. The first modem we purchased had a speed of 14.4 Kbps, which made a long creaking sound when getting connected to the internet. Once connected the next step was to open Livewire BBS, a command line interface to surf the internet. This was followed by a set of unix based commands to connect to websites, read text content and download images to view them. The speed used to be very slow and it took almost 5-7 minutes to download a 200Kb image. We downloaded images of Bollywood stars and stored them locally as we would save any treasure. Sounds funny now, but this was a great excitement given that GUI browsers did not exist until then. In a year or two, GUI browsers like Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator came up, with lots of new developments in technology coming up everyday.

Another new technology of the time was being able to send and receive files over email to save on delivery costs. The irony was that people did not check emails as frequently as they do now. When our New Delhi office sent some message to our Mumbai office, and vice versa, the email was usually followed by an STD call asking the recipient to connect to the internet and download the email. Eventually when it was realized that STD calls only increased communication costs, we had to set a process where emails would be checked and responded to 4-5 fixed times in a day.

Today we live in a highly tech savvy world where we cannot imagine being without a mobile phone even for a few hours, but I am one of those lucky people who have seen technology evolve from it's very early days.