I WAS in grade-school at a time when computers had yet to happen. By computers, I mean the standard desktop we know of today or something as nearly as recognizable, not its roomy precedents we learned about in our Computer subject. The introduction chapter taught us about Eniac and Edvac, which are clunky apparatuses that I identified in a quiz as “students’ lockers”. Back then it was easy to just agree to the teacher that these are the first-generation computers that made the world then “digital”. Back now, however, you might as well say that these are the kind of crap our parents had to live with.
Because, when it comes to functionality, even the most basic modern calculator couldn’t begin to match one of these things. They could do a little math, and spared our forefathers from having to count using sticks and toenails. But that’s it, and you couldn’t own one if you didn’t have a garage.
I asked my mother whether, back in grade-school, they had a Computer subject. They had none. The least she could recall is they learned about Cobol in college, and tapped away on a typewriter in the “correct method”, where her left-hand fingers were fixed on “ASDF”. There was hardly a need for an Internet back then, if only because there was, well, no Internet back then. They had bigger problems, where, if they had the wrong input, they were torn between having to leave the error be or blot their test papers with correction fluid.
Our first desktop at home was bulky, and the Internet was Globe dial-up. Unlike now, we didn’t have to kvetch on how backward the Philippines was for having a crappy Internet connection. Because we didn’t know what’s crappy and what’s tolerable in the first place; what mattered was whether you had an Internet connection. Here you type “World War 2” on the search engine, here you wash the dishes while waiting for the results; there was no problem having to sit for hours to get a simple Google search done, save for the rub that nobody could use the phone while someone was using the Internet.
It was in an age where computers were serving a new purpose, rather than just make Word Art and embody the very definition of matter (everything that occupies space and has mass). The purpose now was to connect you to the rest of the world, and I often referred to our computer as a telephone with a TV screen.
Accustomed to Internet-capable phones now as a way to connect to the Internet, I wonder if grade-schoolers in this “wired generation” are reading the same Computer books we had back in the day or whether they take hands-on Word Art exams like we did. Or does a Computer subject in grade-school today matter at all? As it happened, kids half my age are more computer- and Internet-savvy, and demanded lessons on how they could hack their teacher’s Facebook account. Disconnect them from the Internet for a day and they’d be on a roll, and they wouldn’t talk to you and tell their friends not to if they discover you’re doing Facebook on a dial-up connection.
“For crying out loud, did you live during the Bubonic Plague?” they would say. Because our Internet connection has become more advanced as Internet has become ever more of a necessity. And while we’re on the top of the evolutionary ladder and it’s Neanderthal to be strapped on an extreme, pouncing on your desktop on a dial-up network, I also wonder how far we have gone and what’s on the other extreme—if you will the most modern connection our generation can ever get.
There is the fiber-optic connection, which transmits data in a speed of light. Turns out, our local service providers, like Globe, can provide just that, and plug us to a 1-Gbps wireless connection on this technology, a far cry from the standard Mbps connection into which we are all congested.
It’s the selfsame breakneck speed they enjoy in benchmark countries like the US, Thailand and Indonesia. Pay P9500 a month on subscription to Globe Tattoo Platinum Broadband Plan 9499 (tattoo.globe.com.ph) and you get the exclusivity of service akin to not having to drive through a highway that doesn’t have to ply even the Skyway or—God forbid—Edsa, but through a different dimension, through a path of light almost, where you realize that if you are not driving, you might as well be floating. And while we’re at that, you might as well realize we’re not so lagging behind in all these areas.
But that is, you know, expensive. Yet that’s the most competitive snatch one can get in the market today, a price at par with that of the US. There are more affordable fiber-optic options in the Globe Tattoo Platinum Broadband bundles that are also a quantum-leap faster from what you have at home, like the 500-Mbps connection at Plan 7499, 200 Mbps at Plan 4499, 100 Mbps at Plan 3499 and 50 Mbps at Plan 2499.
For the time being these fastest and most modern Platinum connections, however, are initially only available in certain—but not too few—areas, like, among in so many others, within Ortigas, Makati and Taguig, areas with higher demand for faster broadband speeds. But eventually the fiber-to-home will be more encompassing and more inexpensive as Globe fiber network inches to every nook and cranny nationwide.
The fiber-optic connection through Globe Tattoo Platinum Plan is brought about by an increasingly “wired generation.” You hear these words and ask, “Does ‘a wired generation’ mean we’re any more advanced now?” And is something as technical as the fiber-optic connection a “wired generation” learn from today’s Computer books? I told a grade-schooler this and he was quick to say that, well, he’s not. “I’m on Wi-Fi,” he said, probably wondering what century I inhabit.
Image credits: Jimbo Albano