My life has been extraordinary. Not at all because of what I've made of it, but because of the many wonderful things that I have been able to witness and experience. Once I saw a historical transition. I didn't know how much it would have to do with my life today...
Back in Calcutta, we still did the joint family thingie then. My father stayed in the same house with his two other brothers and my grandparents. My grandfather had a radio. But if you try to think hard and think of a radio, you wouldn't be able to imagine my grandfather's radio. It was a biggish box. Really big. It would occupy a tabletop all by itself. There were lots of dials and a mystic yellow light came out and there was a band of bright green line of light on a dial somewhere...
Anyway, there were family get togethers in front of the radio.
He later got a smaller one which you had to shake really hard from time to time to keep going. It was like a fat book. The design on the dial was terrible and a nightmare to use. It eventually broke and something in my subconscious memory tells me that I had a hand in the anti-engineering feat.
My father tells me that one day my uncle walked in with a small radio held to his ear. The excitement in the Mitra household was palpable as everyone converged to see this new marvel, which could be carried around wherever you went. It was the size of a grown man's palm and about an inch thick. Radio on the go!
It had another name though. It was called the "transistor radio". This became such a rage in Calcutta that very soon people began to forget part of the name - the more important part in my opinion. They started calling it the "transistor". I don't know if this happened throughout the rest of India also. (If you could tell me or find out, I'd be interested. This would be around 1980 I guess.) All radios were promptly identified as "transistors" - irrespective of caste or creed or operating frequency!
Oh I forgot to say. There was a switch on the newer transistor radios you could flick (well force to click actually, it was an extremely hard mechanical switch and required considerable force (considerable to a three year old at any rate!) to flick between the two markings of 'AM' and 'FM'. I spent a remarkable amount of time doing this flicking and as a result of this initimate dalliance with the intricacies of communication theory, I stayed confused for a very long time between the AM/FM and AM/PM pairs...
Did I mention the household TV? Colour TV's were unheard of and only very rich men had them. We had a black and white set. It was more blue and grey set actually. And sometimes the pictures just rolled from top to bottom and wouldn't stay still. You were then supposed to turn a spiky poky dial called 'V.HOLD' and things returned to normal. If that didn't work you could slap the top of the TV a few times. Last resort - switch off the TV for some time and switch it back again. Rebooting always worked - a practice Microsoft adopted with great success later on...
And then Mamma Mia and Va Va Voom! Gifts from the West! My maternal cousins (two of them) had come back after quite some time abroad. They were the foreign returns, loaded with and giving everyone absolutely fabulously amazing gifts. I got a model car (first time that I heard of BMW), battery operated and it turned and went another direction if it hit something in its way. I was a stingy child and didn't let it run for too long for fear of using up its batteries. But the coolest thing about it was that I could turn a mechanical knob on the underside of the car to make headlights pop out of its bonnet. They were battery operated as well and shone two dense circles of light. I thought that was the coolest thing anybody had ever thought of.
Then it happened. My cousins fixed up a typewriter like gadget (to their Sony colour television) and you could play games on the TV after that. It was called a computer. To load a game you had to insert a cassette and press rewind and fast forward to spin to the parts you required. Then it would display "© 1982 Sinclair Research Limited" on the screen. You could write something called a "program" and make the computer do stuff. My cousins wrote one that would draw a TV set inside the TV set - and then it would continue to draw repeatedly but each time with a different colour. I was fascinated.
I wanted a computer very badly. I was about eight years old then I think. In a year or so this same computer debuted in India and I would stare at the newspaper advertisements. My parents at that point in time could not afford the machine (it was Rs. 4500) and soon I realised that I wasn't getting one any time soon.
I can't tell you how painful the next eight years or so were. My mind was dealing with the myriad possibilities of programming and the stuff I could do with a computer. I read up programming books and knew the keyboard of this computer by heart. Sometimes I would take out my father's mechanical typewriter and pretend that it was a computer.
I begged people to let me use their computers. I knew everything about BASIC by then but had never had the opportunity of typing out a program on one. The rich kids even had "printers". These were "spark printers" and printing on them was literally a violent process because it made an awful noise and emitted sparks (hence the name) and filled the room with a mild burning smell. All that was normal of course as the printer magically transferred what was on the screen to paper.
Soon the landscape changed. Computers began to be called "personal computer" - 'PC' for short. They shipped with dedicated "monitors" and "floppy drives". The floppy diskettes were flexible (hence floppy) things (magnetic platters) which could store your programs and the monitors were miniature TV sets with seven green scan lines for each character. St. Xavier's purchased a few PC's and I shall be ever grateful to them for it, because I could finally get legal and quality time in front of these fantastic machines every week at school.
In 1994, I wrote my Class 10 board exams. As in I went in for battle, my parents said that if I did decently they would consider getting me a computer. Amazingly enough I stood first from my school. (I remember the almost decade-long wait even today. As I write this from my prized MacBook, I look up heavenwards and say "Thank You".)
My machine was a 386DX. It had 128KB of memory and new storage device called the "hard disk" which was much faster and could store more data than the floppy - mine could store all the way upto 260MB. The monitor was no longer green but true black and white and could display upto 16384 different shades of grey. The clock speed was 133 MHz and the entire rig was assembled by a local outfit and cost over Rs. 30,000. Very soon, people started coming over to my house to use my computer - much like I had gone over to others' till recently.
Round about this time, I also heard of Apple Computers. As if the name wasn't funny enough, they sold computers named the Macintosh. My friend Chirodeep's father was an Apple computer dealer in Calcutta and all I remember is a select circle of people claiming elite status because of their association with Apple. Those were powerful machines which "professionals" used...
I don't really remember any other big technological change after that. There was the Palm and the mobile phone of course, but by then I had lost my childlike wonder.
More than two decades later however, I came back to the "transistor".
If you forgot about the historical transition that I talked about in the beginning, and didn't see it, I have another version of this story coming up.
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