Hi all Getting on the net was very exciting. I had my first taste of it as early as 92's. Internet came to India arround 95.
I must add here I am a ham. I bought a terminal node connector (TNC) similar to a modem. This was connected to my Walkie Talkie transmittor. We had a BBS at Bombay. Using this I could send email messages, join news groups, do file transfer including binary files and even text chat. For voice chat we could do it even directly. It was simply a wonderful world to step into. Many years later, when I joined a networking programme I realised the great contribution of ham's in computer networking technology. A few years later on, a ham, at South Africa set up a gateway, with which we could send emails to non hams on internet. In 96 I moved to Bangalore on promotion. I bought a new 486 system. The multi media kit also had an internal modem. Bangalore had a very interesting BBS. Justin, Geetha and myself had great time up there. Unfortunately, there was a mishap and the only functional BBS in India became defunct. Sometime thereafter, VSNL introduced internet in India. The plans were very expensive. They offered a reduced rate plan for students. Some of us shared an account. We had to use a terminal emmulator programme. I found one terminal emmulator called commo very good. There was no browser then. There was a text browser which resided on the server. It was called Lynx. I guess, this is still arround. One setting allowed us to browse effectively. The links were numbered and we had to key in the number to open it. There was an interesting way to check mails. There used to be a format called qwk format. The emails would get zipped up and we had to download it. Later on we could read it off line and open it in a qwk reader. Closed to a pop3 account in the present days. The popular sites we would visit were nfbnet.org, empowermentzone.com and fergusonenterprises.com NFBNET too had a very interesting BBS. We would telnet to it. The student account server was getting miserably bad by the day. Fortunately, BSNL reduced prices for the TCPIP account. I migrated to it. This was a non text account and our old tools would not work. It required a browser at the client end. I came across a programme called nettamer which allowed us to serf the net in text mode on DOS. I ran it for some years until I moved to Windows finally. So long for todays episode. Tomorrows one shall be the Windows saga. Until then, This is yours truely signing off. Harish. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Harish Kotian" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2007 11:14 PM Subject: Re: [AI] history of computer education for blind in india Part 3 > Hello all > > Today I'll deal with the effectiveness of computer education. This would > also touch on the suggestion of Subramani, of using, the old screen > readers. > > During the good DOS days, there was a huge demand for programmers and > those who were savy in it. So, the emphasis was on software development. > Computer was not percieved as an assistant and a tool. unthinkable in any > form of entertainment except the computer games. > > Computer was seen as an end rather as a means to an end. This was the big > bottleneck for effective teaching in computers. > > All said and done not all could get to thinking like a computer and hence > most were really not suited for computer training at that point of time. I > had done all my computer education in the meanstream courses and even > there one could get only 1 to 3 % good programmers. > > During the days when I was teaching mostly the blind and some able bodied, > I found similar results. I must confess, the results of teaching computer > training was not generating very good results. The level of involvement > was not very good either. > > DOS was totally command driven and hence one need to know each and every > commands. It was text based and generally there were not much of UI > problems. > > The screen readers were pretty efficient in providing all the information > one needed to know. Some were even smart to trigger different action when > values changed in certain location on the screen. The screen reader had an > easier way to seek information. There were reading the content from the > video RAM which had a fixed address.DOS was a single user system and only > one task could be performed at a time. However the OS allowed for > application to be memory resident, therefore, this was used for the screen > readers to eves drop on the video memory. > > The cenerio changed in mid 90's with the Windows also comming in. > The 32 bit processing totally changed, in the range and variety, the > computers were used. soon it was turning to be a tool capable of doing > multiple things almost simultaneously. > > It was this time the effectiveness of imparting computer education proved > very benificial andeffective. We got good results all over the country > during these days. > > I'll call it a day now and touch on the time using computer networks. Bye > until then. > Harish. > > To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with the subject unsubscribe. > > To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, > please visit the list home page at > http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in > To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
