A New Beginning Revamping My Website

For a long time I have been contemplating the revamp of my website, which was lying in a time warp. I have always been fascinated by computers and the internet. The first computer that I owned was a Spectrum 128K, way back in 1987. It was hardly a computer! It was, at most, a toy with 128KB of RAM! There was no concept of a hard drive and the data was stored on cassette tapes in form an audio signal. The tape screeched and loaded the game or the program into the RAM. There was no monitor.

The Spectrum hooked to the TV via a cable. The first PC that I bought had a hard disk of 10MB if I remember rightly. Unlike the Spectrum, it had a dedicated monochrome monitor. It ran on DOS. There were huge,

Spectrum 128K

noisy dot matrix printers that came as accessories. It was not until Microsoft came up with Windows operating system that colour was added to computer monitors. From the PC-XT, I jumped to Windows 95. ‘Wordstar’, ‘DBase’, ‘Lotus’ of the DOS era were replaced by the Microsoft Office suite.

Computers have come a long way since then. From the Spectrum 128K to my Apple iPhone 7 Plus, I have enjoyed my travel with technology. I am fascinated by it but not enough so as to allow it to pervade and take control of my life. The internet when it first arrived in India had fascinated me in the same manner. The tortoise-ish pace of the dial up connection, which made similar screeching noises as the cassettes for the Spectrum did, failed to dampen the enthusiasm to get on to the internet and travel the world without leaving one’s seat. The feeling of an e-

mail reaching beyond seven seas in a matter of seconds was fascinating to say the least. Then the chat rooms started. Strangers became friends – sometimes those who lived beyond borders.

Email, chat, and websites changed not just communication but our entire lives and the way we looked at the world. Your own space on the internet was a fascinating concept. I had a webpage on Geocities, a virtual home by Yahoo. After Geocities closed operations I built my first website myself using Microsoft Publisher. Orkut arrived and the term ‘social media’ gained a whole, new meaning. The common man found voice leading to complete democratisation of media. Blogger and WordPress gave the platform of blogs to amateur writers and all of a sudden it was not necessary to have your writings in print to be a published author. I started my own blog – Music in the World of Noise in 2006. My web presence has been decent but then I felt the need for a website again and just the way old, dilapidated buildings go for redevelopment to seek revival, I decided to revamp my website. This time, I decided, that it would be advisable to have everything properly and professionally done. My friend, Vivek Padhye, did a great job of designing this website. I hope you like it. I am in the process of moving all my old blog posts to this address now. It feels like moving from a rental apartment to an ownership bungalow! Feel free to look around the website and give your suggestions and feedback.