With a foot in the past

What is it that draws us to the past? Is it the faint glint of nostalgia that seeps through the corner of your brain? Or is it the imagery, the faint illusion of control, that you thought existed from years past. Like everything technology has an ancestry. Like the great kings in fables, everything you use now has a history behind it. In most cases, people may not even know where it came from or the dozens of tech that was sacrificed along the way.

In my case, I grew up in an era of video tapes and audio cassette's. I was one of the fortunate few who owned a dusty old 486, bought at a sale from my moms office. To be completely honest, I rarely used it for anything other than the occasional session of Jordan Mechner's prince (I still call it that because that was the name of the .exe) or Id's Wolfenstein 3D. For years to come, the pc for me was just another gaming rig. Not that there weren't any practical uses for a system back then. The branding and marketing guys were just as powerful, remember the beanstalk? Remember how many parents were conned in to buying their kids one in the guise of education? Remember the institutes that taught you how to actually use a DOS system? To be fair though, the pc's were bulky and complicated enough for people to use for anything other than games. That perception didn't change until the day I first saw Windows 3.1 in action.

Now here was a system that didn't need you to memorise a manual. It was visual, instead of telling you to input a command, you actually clicked on files, well, a virtual representation of your files. It somehow felt more personal than just typing a few commands in a black window. You could drag and drop files, pick them up and move them in the virtual space. The movement of the mouse seemed like an extension of your arms, like you had reached in to another world. This awe did eventually go away though. Part of the reason is now everyone uses a computer, it isn't that sought after like when everyone used to show up at a friends place, because he was the only one within 2 colonies that had one.

It's a testament then to the popularity of the personal computer that it has persevered through all these years. It was flexible enough to adapt to changing form factors, laptops, smartphones even the chip inside your car is a computer, it has managed to transcend gracefully from one timeline to the next without losing its primary focus.

Audio tapes are a different matter though. Remember the time when buying just a song meant getting your friend to buy the whole album and recording the one track you want on a blank cassette. Or those long discussions about the quality of a blank TDK 60 min vs a Sony one. My friend would swear by a TDK tape often convincing me that they had a warmer sound in contrast to the often cold sounding Sony ones. Clearly, we were naive in thinking that the tape alone somehow made a difference, we would discover the secrets of recording techniques much later and the concept of generation loss entered our tiny brains years after we started mixing tapes. Believe it or not, the idea of your own compilation of songs was a profitable business back then, with many shops around home charging nearly ₹10 a song plus the cost of the blank tape. Then Napster came along and changed everything.

Around that time, we were dabbling in the dial up modem era internet, where downloading a 200 MB file used to take forever, not to mention jammed phone lines. I would genrally leave my pentium 4 on overnight to download utilities and demos, needless to say, it would be like waking up next to a jet engine by morning, with the processor fans reving up trying to cool the poor overworked processor down. Napster changed music forever, or at least it seemed to be the thing that was the next step. For all its advanced technology of allowing users to share files, it failed to calculate the one thing that was important, the pricing. Napster was free, filled with albums that you couldn't get in India. The first time I heard the opening of "The ghost of the navigator" I was hooked. My life was a blur of download ques and seeds and leechers after that, and I will freely admit Napster took up a huge chunk of my life. As I used it more and more though, I couldn't help but feel I was getting half a product. The tangible, physical copy of the album always made you value it more than something that exists in 1's and 0's in cyberspace. Music lived on tape, you had to take care of them, store them in cool areas, you could gawk at the artwork and read the lyrics printed within the booklet. It felt tangible, made you respect it more. Creating a compilation on tapes meant carefully choosing track orders so that they flow into the next song, Napster somehow seemed like an inferior choice without much magic. Eventually Napster fell to the wayside, embroiled in court disputes and legal battles, Then the iPod happened.