10 years ago

10 years ago, end of March, 1998, I started to step in to Information Technology field, with the commencement of my college course at APIIT Kuala Lumpur. Until today, a lot things had happened, especially in IT field that changes almost everyday. Let’s have a flashback on how IT field looked like 10 years ago:

• We connected to Internet using TmNet or Jaring dial up connection, the speed was 36.6 kbps, downloading a 3MB MP3 taking up around 30-45 minutes, if the line dropped in middle of download, we needed to start all over again
• Winamp was the main MP3 player, because the Windows 98 built-in Media Player couldn’t play MP3
• Xing Mpeg was the main VCD player, because… same reason with above
• Obviously, we were using Microsoft Windows 98… XD
• Chinese Star and NJStar were the main tools we needed to view and write Chinese characters
• Yahoo! was the top search engine, Jerry Yang was the proud of Chinese
• Hotmail was not belong to Microsoft, providing 2MB mail space
• Netscape was the top browser, but Internet Explorer was taking over, until now Netscape is died
• ICQ was the hottest instant messenger
• We searched and knew friends from mIRC, then we met them after chatting for few times
• Forums were generally known as BBS (Bulletin Board System) that time
• You could earn quite good money with simple and plain HTML-designed web pages
• There were damn a lot of Titanic-themed websites
• Mobile phone was an expensive accessory, I couldn’t afford to own one until my first job. At 1999 when Nokia 3210 launced, it was a hit, we borrow classmates’ 3210 phones to play the popular Snake game, tried to record down our own highest score in them
• Scanner was the important tool to produce a photo’s softcopy, because digital camera was a luxury accessory (actually did anyone has one at 1998?)
• Display card, sound card, modem, network card were not part of motherboard
• All cards were plugged on motherboard’s PCI and ISA slots, while expensive VooDoo 3D card plugged into AGP slot, which only available on expensive motherboard
• Creative sound blaster 16-bits sound card was damn popular
• CD burner was expensive
• Quantam BigFoot hard disk with the width of 5.25″ was popular, having a 4.3GB hard disk was already hugh
• We were using EDO RAM, 64MB RAM was amazingly big
• Imbi Plaza was the main point for IT gadgets