I come from a much older age and I was in UK and the UK government was considering use of the American made Cellphones and was thinking of changing from wired connections to wireless with a higher pay.
I resisted violently for User Pays Strategy and the Caller Pays Strategy should be introduced and we were using bleeper for hospital communication which I hated.
I still use the land phone (read my piece on algorithm) and use cellphone for playing games when I am bored.
Reproduction
Bits & Bytes' of a Journey along the Digital Highway
March 28, 2018, 10:16 pm
I went through the same but in UK and in New Zealand.
New Zealand had a primitive system and American bought it outright.
The bottom line is those days it was cheap and now it is very costly.
I am in Australia and I have not given a call for over 18 months.
Nobody use emails nowadays.
By Nalaka Devendra
I ask: "Alexa, What's my Flash Briefing?"
Alexa - is not human. Rather, it is a small disc-shaped, talking
computer, connected to the Internet, wirelessly.
I am not hallucinating; I am not under the influence of any
mind-altering drug. I am not even watching a re-run of Arthur C.
Clarke’s "2001: Space Odyssey", imagining that I am
talking to HAL 9000.
It is 2018 and I am sitting in my home/office.
Never in my wildest dreams did I foresee myself communicating with
a talking computer!
The disc-shaped gizmo is the Echo-Dot 2, and Alexa is the voice
activated service. Together, it can search the Internet and read to
me, today's weather, headline news, play the BBC World Service radio,
solve maths questions and a whole lot more, which I am yet to
explore.
It is a gift from a friend in the US.
In the beginning
Born in 1964, I lived the first five-years of my life, in
Trincomalee. I also completed my Montessori education and started
proper school, there.
It was there that I was taught the most basic
of communication skills - to talk, read and write.
My father made me a small, shallow box or tray, with dark-blue
varnish paper at the bottom covered with a thin layer of sea sand. It
became the first writing surface I used. My parents guided my small
fingers to form letters, both English and Sinhala. Later, when I
started school proper in Grade 1, I wrote on a slate (gal-laella)
with a stylus made of slate (gal-koora) to write letters and form
words. Writing on paper and books, came later. Little did I realise
that I would be using those fingers and stylus half-a-century later,
on my Smartphone and Digital Tablet!
A luxury called a telephone
When we lived in the Naval Dockyard (Trincomalee), we had a
telephone in each of the houses where we lived. But they were
connected to a private exchange (PABX) which belonged to the Sri
Lanka Navy. When we needed to call someone within the Dockyard, you
lifted the receiver and asked the operator to connect us with the
other party. It was the same, when we wanted to call an outside
party, in Colombo. Long distance calls were commonly known as
'trunk-calls'. Direct dialing was non-existent.
The phone
instruments themselves were large, heavy and made of Bakelite, an
early form of plastic.
We moved back to Colombo, during the latter part of 1970. None of
the houses that we lived in, had a telephone. Owning a telephone was
a great luxury. Perhaps the owners didn't quite think so, as the
entire neighbourhood did not think twice about knocking on the door,
asking permission to make a call!
Whenever we moved into a new
neighbourhood, the first thing we did was find out which house owned
a telephone and get friendly with them. We need a point of contact,
in case of an emergency. We finally got our own telephone in 1978/79,
after we moved to Dehiwela. It was then that we experienced the full
impact of owning a phone. We had the entire neighbourhood knocking on
our door, irrespective of the time of day, wanting to make a call!
After all these years, we no longer need the 'operator at the
exchange' to connect us to anyone. Our phones are no longer bulky. So
it is ironic that no one even asks me for my home phone number
anymore!
Instead, they want my mobile number, my Skype ID and my
Email Address. The new phones are slim and aesthetically pleasing.
They fit into your pocket. There are 'hands-free' gizmos which means
you don't even have to take out the phone from your pocket to answer
it. The next time you see a person seemingly talking to himself, the
chances are he is using his hands-free gizmo. Some people have more
than one mobile phone - why, I do not know..
International Direct Dialing (IDD) is a basic feature today. It
was not so, back then. Not even in the early '90s. I used to go to a
'communication centre' in Liberty Plaza to call my sister (studying
in India) and my parents (living in Sharjah). I used to call them at
night as charges were low. Even then, I paid Rs. 300 per minute and
my wallet was much lighter, at the end of the exercise.
Technology blurred the lines
Thanks to the advancement of telecommunication technology, we
don't even have to use conventional methods of talking to one
another. We can talk (voice), video chat (live video) with people
both within and outside the country, through the Internet. The cost
is negligible when compared to the 300/- per minute I used to pay. In
fact, you don't even need a telephone to talk to one another - just
use your computer.
My Smartphone, is in fact, a computer!
Today, the line between a computer and a phone is so blurred that
it’s mind boggling. In fact, your average Smartphone is both. It's
'computer' component is a thousand times more powerful than the first
general purpose computers I cut my teeth on, way back in the
mid-1980s.
My first (proper) job was working at a Government
Corporation, where I was the sole employee of the Information
Technology (IT) Department. Back then, it was simply called the
'computer department'. This was in 1985. The first computer there did
not have a hard disk. All it had was a bank of 8-inch floppy disks.
The computer itself, had a random access memory (RAM) of 64KB! The
printer I had was a dot-matrix, 132-column printer. But we got a lot
of productive work done with the limited resources at our disposal:
on reflection, we probably used those computers to its full
potential. I seriously doubt, if people use their present computers
(including the ones inside smart-phones) for more than 30% of its
potential.
Back then, when we wrote computer programmes (lines of
instructions to get a computer to do our biding), we did not simply
sit in front of a terminal and type away. We had to first plan and
draw up a "flow-chart". Then, we had to plan our programme
by writing a pseudo-code. It was only then, that we got down to the
bare-knuckle typing of the actual code. But that was not the end:
then came the programme compilation - a process of converting our
typed instructions into a form which the computer could comprehend.
All of this took time and planning. There were no short cuts or magic
solutions. There were no 'apps and applets' to make life easy. Each
and every mundane task had to be clearly spelt out.
My second job was at a company where we designed, developed and
implemented turn-key (mostly bespoke) computer solutions for our
customers. Although we had a large team of programmers, we had a
limited number of computer terminals. As a result, we got very
limited 'terminal time'. There was a time-table posted on the door,
giving 30-minute slots for terminal-time. No one was allowed to book
more than two slots consecutively. Each morning, there was a rush to
book time-slots and much begging and horse trading among us to get as
much terminal time as possible. For the balance of the day, it was
back to paper, writing our code and checking and re-checking the
same. Never did I visualize an era when we would have a computer on
our tables, at homes or carry it around with you.
Pre 'Internet' days
My third job (also in the '80s) was with an IBM Business Partner.
By this time, Personal Computers (PCs) were making its presence felt in the corporate world in Sri Lanka: not the sleek and ergonomic ones seen today but large, solidly built and heavy. It was also the era when we came face-to-face with graphical user interface (GUI) and the wonderful mouse!
We, more or less, kissed goodbye to the 'command
prompt' and text-commands.
Some of our customers needed specific and specialised licensed
software, for their work. These specialised applications such as
CAD/CAM, Statistical Analysis, GIS, Communication Software, etc. None
of these were readily available in the local market. We had to place
orders with overseas suppliers and wait (often quite a while) for the
goods to arrive.
As always, our customers expected the goods to be
delivered, yesterday!
As the customer is 'always right', we had to find ways and means of getting the software to them, in the shortest possible time. Our office was located on the top-floor of a three-story building. The Internet was yet to come to our part of the world. The only practical way to obtain these applications was to connect to the supplier's system and 'download' it. Our office did not have an IDD facility. However, luckily for us, there was a 'communication centre' located on the ground-floor of our building. We rigged up a long (very long) telephone cable from our office to the communication centre and connected their telephone (with IDD) to our office and to one computer in our office. The IDD connection to our overseas supplier was not great and the line got disconnected several times. But we always managed to download the software and satisfy the customer.
All this took place late at night.
Needless to say we never got much
sleep. Today, thanks to the Internet, all what we did, could be done
in a matter of minutes. But back then, we had limited resources. But
we were more innovative and found solutions in the most unexpected
ways. Necessity is, indeed the mother of inventions.
And then, the 'Internet' came
I was there, at the official launch of the Internet in Sri Lanka.
Yes, now I sound like a dinosaur.
There were no dedicated lines (ADSL or Fibre) back then.
We used a Modem to connect to our ISP.
It made a
god-awful racket while establishing the connection and the speeds
were slow. But, we had access to a whole new world! At that time, my
wife and I lived in a small flat. We shared a telephone line with our
landlord. Before I went on-line', I would inform them, so that my
Internet connection would not be interrupted.
Gradually Internet speeds increased and so did the technology.
Today, you get high speed connections to your door-step.
The latest is fibre-optic lines to your home.
The all important MODEM is now a
museum piece.
Soon we also had email and what a wonderful tool it was! We were
able to communicate (and share pictures) with our friends and
families all over the world. We thought that we had finally arrived.
That we were now in par with the rest of the developed world. Boy,
were we wrong !
Little did we know that a juggernaut called Social
Media was barrelling its way towards us.
To my generation I say "We have come a long way baby !"
(The writer can be contacted at nalakadevendra@gmail.com)
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