I have been using computers since 1997. It’s been 10 years since than. Today I have decided to share with you my views on some of the technologies, gadgets that I think have changed, touched our lives in more ways than we could ever imagine. I hope to do this over a period of time. Let me begin with my experience with them. I will try to be as chronologically correct as possible.
To begin with I will start with mp3. mp3’s is one of those things that if you think about it now, you would wonder how we ever lived without it before 1997. I was given a CD by a friend of mine. He told me that it contained 170 songs and I was like ‘WHAT???’. This was in when I was in college, when buying a CD was a five hundred rupee affair. I remember I hardly had any CD’s then. It would have to be a really amazing album for me to spend that kind of money on it. I normally used to buy cassettes. So imagine having 170 of the latest songs on a CD and being able to listen to it and they sounded no different to the actual CD. The first song that I listened to was I think ‘my heart will go on’ by Celine Dion. I am not sure, it was either this or ‘torn’ by Natalie Imbruglia. It was no easy task to convince my friend to allow me to take the CD for a day so that I could copy the ‘mp3s’ on my machine. And on the CD there was this software called ‘Winamp’. My friend told me that to listen to the songs I had to install this exe. To this day I listen to my mp3s using Winamp. Since that fateful day 10 years back, so much has changed in the way we listen to music and most of it thanks to mp3.
Today have gigabytes of mp3’s is so common. Mp3 have made listening to music so accessible. You can listen to it at work, while traveling, while working out. Most people that I know listen to music from mp3’s. I also want to mention that mp3 have made more music available to people. Today it’s possible to find and listen to the rarest of the rare music through the internet. Tracks from movies, original compositions from every nook and corner of this planet are available. I wonder sometimes if the people behind the mp3 codec ever thought that they were going to revolutionized music when they decided to work on that piece of code. I would like to know how they feel about this today.