In last week’s edition of GeekSpeak I had written about the floppy disk, an extinct piece of technology once considered integral to computers. Today, let me take up a few more of that genre, which my previous generation considered ordinary, my generation got the chance to see in use for a while, and in all probability will be unseen by the next generation unless stored in some museum.
The typewriter
Before the dawn of Microsoft Word, Word Pad, Word Perfect or even Notepad, the printed word still existed. Typewriters were more than just a means to type out letters and documents. Once upon a time, they represented a career aspiration for a large number of people, along with shorthand. Stenographers were an essential part of most offices, where very few people were capable of handling the QWERTY keyboard of a typical typewriter.
Malayattoor Ramakrishnan’s classic novel Verukal (Roots), which was part of our school syllabus, portrays the trend in a very effective manner. The protagonist, who eventually becomes an IAS officer, was originally advised by his villagers to become a typist and seek employment in ‘Bombay’ - a career which he describes as very much appreciated in his small village. Institutes of Commerce were common when I was growing up, most of them teaching typewriting and shorthand, thus making people employable in the offices of those days. To add to the difficulty, no corrections could be made on a typewriter (since it had no Backspace key as we know it in computers), except using erasing fluid (white ink). A major mistake (more than one character or two), usually meant you had to retype the whole thing from the beginning. There was no option to save now and print later, which meant if you needed 10 copies of a document, you had to manually type it out 10 times. Apart from the heavy, noisy mechanical typewriters we tend to remember, there was something called an electronic typewriter which was popular in DTP centres. These allowed you to type one line at a time into the device’s limited memory, and make corrections before printing out that one line. Then you moved on to the next line.
VCRs and VCPs
Once upon a time, video libraries in the state used to stock these box-like things we used to call video cassettes. These were usually black in colour, and each could store one standard 2-3 hour movie, with some high density versions storing longer recordings.
The essential component of these was magnetic tape, and so just like floppy disks, we had to keep them away from strong magnetic fields. The Video Casette Player (VCP) was another box like device, slightly larger than the DVD player of today, used to play these cassettes. As the name suggests, the Video Cassette Recorder (VCR) was a more advanced version which allowed you to record video on a cassette. These cassettes were typically reusable, meaning once you were tired of seeing one movie over and over again, you could record another one over it with the right tools.
If kept unused for a long time, cassettes used to get infected by ‘fungus’ - the actual biological variety, unlike the computer viruses of today. And by the way, yes, wedding videos of those days were stored on these video cassettes, instead of DVDs as they are today.
Film Cameras
I had already written a lengthy treatise about the trend of digital photography in an earlier edition of GeekSpeak , so let me be very brief here.
Film cameras used a roll of light sensitive film to store photographs. After ‘exposure’ (the term used to describe taking a picture) these had to undergo a chemical process of ‘developing’ the film before you could get your hands on the photographs - no computers were involved. There was no option to see a preview of the picture you took and to discard it if you didn’t like it.
The resolution of a typical film camera was equivalent to a 3.2 MP digital camera of today, I am told. Instead of storing backups of pictures on a CD, thumbdrive or other media, we had something called the ‘negatives’, which were colour-inverted versions of the photographs.
If you lost the negatives, you typically lost your only means to take a duplicate copy of the photographs, although some studios would get you copies from an actual print, in a relatively more expensive process.
Pagers
Just before mobile phones came into the picture, wireless personal communication was made possible for civilians through the pager - since the radio and walkie-talkie were both broadcast, rather than personal. Pagers were used for one way communication of text messages, which were more frequently used to alert people about something rather than actually passing a long message. For example, a computer repairman who was out on his daily rounds could be alerted about a new service request by sending a short text message on his pager - or in technical terms, by ‘paging’ him.
To ‘page’ someone, you had to call his/her pager number from your phone, and the call would be picked up by an operator at the pager service provider. You would then tell them your message, and request it to be sent to the user’s pager.
The pager would beep (hence the nickname ‘beeper’) to alert the user and deliver the message. Of course, to call back, the user would need to find a public telephone booth or other available landline phone, since mobile phones weren’t around back then. Not surprisingly, the pager was made obsolete once mobile phones became popular.
Walkman
‘Walkman’ was the name given to Sony’s portable audio cassette player. These were little boxes, about as big as a compact digital camera of today. They used headphones to provide privacy.
I got my first Walkman some time around 1990, imported from Japan and it was a big wonder to us back then. Companies like National had similar devices, but not as compact, although they were simply called ‘personal cassette players’. Then came Discmans, which played CDs instead of cassettes. Later, I got my hands on a Sony Walkman sometime around 2008, but interestingly, only the name remained intact from the original. The new version was about the size of a thumbdrive, and played MP4 videos on its screen. That was a contemporary of the first iPod, if I remember right. Over the years, technology has changed drastically, as you can plainly see. If you happen to have one or more of these devices lying around your house or office, try to preserve them, so that future generations can see them and marvel at what we used to use before everything converged into a mobile device.
(aravind.r@newindianexpress.com)