Ahfook’s Story

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

Yesterday my dear finally received her Bsc. Degree from APIIT, although she is brilliant enough in her career without the Degree.

The convo ceremony was held in Grand Ballroom of Renaissance hotel KL, quite lots of graduates and guests at there (at least 1000 i guess). Met some old mates, had an expensive lunch, and a messy buffet there as well :p However the ceremony was completed greatly (although a bit boring)

Congratulations my dear, might this achievement will bring you few steps forward in your career