Friday, January 11, 2013

Mammooty,Kajol, Lotus and Internet



It was 6.30 am, and I was sleepy. It was unusual for me to wake that early, for it's vacation. I rode my bicycle to the computer centre where I had been a part of vacation classes that were supposed to teach me Lotus 123 and a new program called Excel. The day was special, our tutor had promised to show us a magic.

Every eyes focussed on the monitor. A browser opened up, he typed in mammootty.com on the address bar. We waited for five minutes; a black and white hour glass was right in front of us. Then a page loaded up, it had pictures of Mammootty. The tutor then proclaimed with pride, "well I don't know these Malayalam actors much". He then typed in Kajol, and voila!...we were now looking at wedding pictures of Kajol.

"So children, this is Internet"
Next he showed us an e-mail. It had an 'attachment', a game that needed him to catch a giant fly on the computer screen with his mouse pointer.

I returned home, thrilled to have seen a 'web page', and yeah, Mammooty had one! (I was always a fan of this guy. Mammooty-Mohanlal fan clashes were common in our class room). I kept thinking about the advances that ride in so fast. 'Things have changed, why do they teach me windows 3.1 anymore at school?', I thought.


Well that was in April, some year...may be 1999 ( yeah, at school we were still being shown windows 3.1).

4 comments:

Brajmohan Kumar said...

Good old dial-up days :)
I remember the excitement between all students at computer center when the teacher connected to the bsnl dial-up connection and then he opened yahoo.com

k.ø.c.h.ü said...

@brajmohan

chill :)

k.ø.c.h.ü said...

Here's what my friend Snehal Patel said:

I remember my excitement with computers when I first learned Lotus 123 back in 1993, and there was Wordstar, it was awesome...I forgot it completely in few years because of not practicing it...Then I came again in contact with computers in 1998...Around the same time I heard a voice of the modem for the first time at the office where I learned and taught computers for part-time...And boy, that voice of modem connecting to internet is nostalgic till this very moment...I remember my boss opening up geocities.com and searching for photos of actresses...the first messenger ICQ, altavista.com, the only free email hotmail, and the browser was Netscape Navigator...I just loved the design of it with that N logo...My gosh, what lovely time it was...When my boss went away to USA leaving me to use the remaining internet hours of VSNL internet, their telephone bill rose to the peak... ...I remember there was a site called ilovevsnl.8m.com by an anonymous hacker, what he used to do was give free vsnl usernames and passwords, which used to cost a fortune at that time...You can read about it on http://www.telegraphindia.com/990702/business.htm ...I remember paying Rs.60 per hour to surf internet to chat with my friend in Australia in 1999...You just gifted me that golden time back buddy...Thanks a lot for your wonderful post...Keep posting Doc...Looking forward to read your lively blog...Thanks once again...

ARJUN MS said...

Hi...

I still remember the first game I played in the PC, a car racing game in black and white, that was awesome!!!!

Nostalgic post.