My First Blog

It was the summer of 99. My dad purchased our very first desktop after months of  my sister and I constantly badgering.  He probably got sick of his daughters (okay, maybe only one of them) showing up at the office to play Minesweeper and Prince of Persia. None of us knew how to set up a computer so we called a technician over. I had no idea what he did to set it up, all I knew was that he left behind a dozen floppy disks and said, “don’t lose these, they have the drivers (what?) on them”. I was psyched! I finally had a brand new computer desk sitting no more than two-feet away from my bed.

Life as I knew it had changed. The first thing I did every day when I got back from school was switch on the computer. I even skipped my afternoon naps. What did I do? I waited for my friends to come online. Why weren’t they already online? They were napping! Yet I stayed up. I downloaded content on Napster, browsed the internet for no apparent reason, played solitaire, and of course, tried to figure out how to play hearts (which by the way I still haven’t been able to do). Days turned into months and slowly into years. I couldn’t imagine spending a day without being on a computer. And here I am today writing my very first blog for Infinitec, a technology company.

A lot has changed since then. Netscape is dead, Napster is dead, and our beloved floppy disks are dead (at least in theory). I didn’t know the importance of backing up data when floppy disks existed. Every time my computer needed to be formatted the technician would charge extra for backing up data because according to him it was a time consuming process. In time I realized I needed to back up my own data in case anything ever went wrong. So I did what everyone did back then: backed up all my files and music on CDs. I had stacks and stacks of CDs labeled MP3 or Data (I admit, I still have those stacks of CDs, I never had the heart to throw them out!). Great! So I’d found a way of backing up my own data so I wouldn’t have to pay extra or worry about my privacy. But was it really convenient? It took ages to burn CDs and it took even longer to copy the data back to my computer and God forbid if the CD had scratches!

Enter flash drives and external hard drives, the best thing ever created! I was excited to see even the first 128MB flash drives that cost a ridiculous amount. Now companies give out flash drives that are at least 1GB in size as freebies, and for the price we paid for 128MB flash drives we can get external hard drives larger than 200GB. I now own a 1TB hard drive that has my back up from a decade ago and I still have every single song I ever downloaded and tons of videos (yes, surprisingly I still have 300GB of free space). However, it still takes ages to copy videos from my hard drive to my laptop or flash drive which I then connect to my DVD player (I’m sure the DVD player would go crazy if I tried connecting a 1TB hard drive to it).

Ironically, Ahmad was the one to tell me that every problem has a solution, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I found a solution to my problem, streaming videos from my hard drive without having to wait for them to be copied, the IUM. No, this isn’t a sales pitch, this is about change. Without change we’d still be stuck with 4GB DVDs, 700MB CDs, 8MB flash drives, or worse, 1.44MB floppy disks. Change is the only thing constant in life and I can’t wait for the day that my coffee table will be able to download content and play it for me!

Preeti Sajnani – Marketing Executive

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