I recently got an email forward from my brother, Atul.
The email had numerous pictures of really awesome looking cars (some production, most prototypes). We share an interest in fast cars and the newest and sleek-est looking pre-production models.

This instantly reminded me of the time I had access to these photographs through the original sneakernet back in the 1990’s at my school, Bishop Cotton Boys School, in Bangalore, India.

Only 1 or 2 of my classmates had access to a computer with a modem and a legit internet connection. The school provided incredibly fast(!!!) pentium 1’s with 14-inch monochrome monitors but no internet connection!

So we ended up having someone borrow someone else’s floppy discs (we had moved from 5.25 inch 1.2mb to 3.5 inch 1.44mb discs by then) and copy the images of the new cars for us.
We then spend loads of computer science lab hours scrolling through the images using the ACDSee software.

We usually had a collection of anywhere from 20 to 50 discs floating around among my classmates and some juniors and seniors too.
Someone, somewhere, had spend a lot of quality (and bloody expensive) internet access time downloading the images.

Looking back, the irregulars were Umang, Gautam Mani, Arun Raghuraman (Rags), Yathin, Bipin, Arjun Thusu, Chirayu, Rohan, Nikhil and a few others.

Those were the times when a single 14.4kbps modem went a loooooong way!

BTW, Rags, where the hell is rags?!

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