The Brush with Future

The Brush with Future

I am always mesmerized with technology.  I will be at home at any shopping center with computer shops. The interest towards technology ticked all the way back when I was a young boy.

My father, who was then working with TELEKOM Malaysia, taught me the basis of technology.  I remembered the day that my father took me to his office. My eyes were wild looking at the machines and tools, trying to figure out which tool to fix which machine. Then I saw the tele-tax machine. It was a huge machine that produced a strip of paper with holes punched along the strip. My father told me that the strip of paper actually consist of information that could be deciphered to text. Like a young kid given a candy, I was given the chance to try out the machine. The deciphering slot was at the left of the machine, and after feeding the strip of punched holes into the hole, the herculean printer deciphered the nonsense looking paper into text. I was amazed. The concept of computer or technology was way out of my understanding at that point of time, however, it fueled my curiosity.

My first “digital” game in 1983 was the ping-pong game console, played via television. It is still considered as the classic gaming console, and was an affordable technology during that era. Represented with two white line left and right and a square dot moving from left to right, it was the in thing during that time.

In 1984, I was introduced to the first computer, a British made Sinclair Spectrum ZX Plus. It was the beginning of technology at that point of time, consist of a keyboard with on board CPU, and data was read through its Audio Cable connection to radio cassette player. It changed my life as it enabled colour based games and simple programmes to be displayed via television.  The programmes came in form of cassette, and data is read and transferred to the system. I could still remember the ping of the cassette, indicating that the computer was reading the programme. As any cassette at that time, moments of entangled ribbons in the radio cassette meant a very long down time.

As time passed, 486DX computer with VGA monitor was the mark of technology during the late 80’s to early 90’s. And the standard printer was the dot matrix printer, loud enough to wake the whole house up if you were printing assignments at 3am. That was the beginning of explosion in technology, television with more colours, Beta VHS player evolved to standard VHS player, Laser Disc, VCD, DVD and now the Blue Ray technology. Television from standard cathode ray tube evolved to Plasma, LCD, LED and the 3D technology. Internet that was earlier accessible from 56.6kb per second modem is now accessible through faster data transfer of 1MB via fiber optics or 4G wireless fidelity, and the list goes on.

Technology has transformed us into a more mobile data user, and the world exploded, literally. Just like the first time I saw the tele-text machine with great awe, I still at awe of what our future like. And that what makes me ticking...…