Some memories of our baby steps to towards IT revolution

Here are my haphazard memories of old computers and our baby steps to IT. It did not turn out as I wanted by still …. that the world it was

What if I tell you that our mainframe was down for hardware maintenance so I had to return with my deck of cards and mag tape?

Does it mean anything to you ? Sounds like I am from Jurassic era.

Well, in 80’s when we took our first baby-steps to the world of IT and software, we worked on mainframe computers. They were very huge. They occupied the whole room. They looked like half a dozen cupboards connected via a weird cable network.

We used punch cards to feed our programs onto the mainframes. Punch cards, punched paper rolls, magnetic tapes and floppies were our devices that stored all our data, our programs and even our text.

All these words have become history now. Today, all data and software are on hard discs or on some “cloud”. Computer guys are called IT engineers. They don’t carry any physical device in their hands. They work on pretty laptops from their own rooms and log into any system in the world.

How things change! Even the word computer programming is old fashioned. It is called software development.

I still think it was only last month that I was struggling with punching my cards in the right sequence in the central computer room, and my colleague loading his mag tape on the wrong drive and the mainframe system was rejecting our programs, again and again finding some or the other errors.

Was it just last month? Or was it 40 years back?

Image coursey – Google

About the author

Do you know who is he? Well, for those above 50, this may have been a familiar sight. He is Kalaiwala. He moved from street to street to brighten our copper and brass cookware with a dazzling silvery look. Moms brought out all old brass vessels and gave him for a new look. We children stood around as he worked, heated the vessel, giving out a familiar sweet smell of Kalai as he magically transformed them into new. Where is he?

The entire fleet of craftsmen have disappeared today. The Kalaiwala, the knife-sharpener, takiwala (the one who sharpened our grinding stones) the one who cleaned and spun the cotton from our mattresses and filled it back.

We are in use and throw era. We do not repair. We replace.

I hope to visit a remote village someday to hear that familiar hollering cry TAMBE PITTAL KALHAIWALA