this was how we were

this was how we did IT- Information Technology

we learned about IT without easy-access and handy gadgets in college.

this was how we survived:

- in college, our earliest IM experience was using "talk" hosted on the server: penoy.admu.edu.ph wherein we can only chat online with a limited number of friends who were hooked on the same server and who are most probably in the same computer lab room.

- i sent emails using my very 1st email address: la960695@admu.edu.ph (1st part is my student ID) -- purely text messages with no fancy attachments

- to send messages to groupmates, we would go to phonebooths and have this type of conversation with a pager company operator (since there were more pagers then than analog cellular phones):

sender: message for 21235689
operator: that's 21235689
sender: meeting at the lib steps at 2 pm.
operator (typing): is that all ma'am?
sender: yes, thank you!

- if we have projects and computer labs are full of crammers, our groupmates who are guys would bring their CPUs and monitors with us, girls helping bring keyboards, mice and AVRs to wherever there are electric sockets. you're very, very, very fortunate now for portable laptops and netbooks!

- without flash disks, we were experts in compressing and decompressing files in multiple diskettes.

- the only printers we had were dot-matrix printers of all shapes and sizes used with their trusty partners, the continuous computer papers (with holes)

- we saw how difficult handheld scanners are used especially if you have shaky hands. imagine the gun-like device used by cashiers in groceries when they're scanning barcodes and using that to scan an 8" x 10" image.

- i sometimes take a nap, then a bath, fix myself and my things while waiting 'til my work in photoshop or in premiere has been rendered completely.

hay, those were the days! but we sure learned a lot! we are even touch typists (types fast without looking at the keys) because we were command-line programmers. we saw how IT progressed, especially here in the Philippines and we're loving how we are able to go with the flow and feel young since we're still able to catch up with IT :)