• Business

Dot matrix printers
Loud, perforated paper printing, still discovered at train ticketing cubicles

Encarta
Microsoft’s CD encyclopedia, which was expected to change big volumes of Britannica from library racks

Facsimile machine
Curling thermal paper messages scanning letters throughout locations

Movie roll cylinder
Kodak or Fuji rolls in black cases, which required a dark space to in some way end up being a photo

Floppies (8″, 5.25″3.5″)
Limited MBs — yes, mega byte — storage in a black plastic case. Used to contain entire games

Game Boy (Monochrome)
Green-tinted handheld gaming, for those lucky few kids in school

Geocities
DIY personal websites with glitter text

Monochrome monitors
Heavy, curved glass displays. Early examples had weirdly green text options only

Hotmail
Email, pre-Gmail. Was cool because of it was an Indian dude, Sabeer Bhatia, who created it

In just 20 years, the world went from floppy disks to cloud, from trunk calls to FaceTime, from money orders to UPI. What Gen Z and Alpha swipe through in seconds, older generations once waited days, weeks, or even months for:

ICQ
Early instant messaging service

Inflight smoking
Technically it took till the early 2000s for airlines to ban smoking. Until then, many offered smoking sections at the back

Inland letters
Foldable blue paper you could write on, for when envelopes were too expensive

Cyber cafés
The internet, available in a shop, chargeable by time spent

ISD/STD/PCO booths
Yellow signs, black boxy phones, and long queues. These were public phones with timed billing slips

LAN parties
Hauling PCs for multi-player gaming, connecting them via cables and playing classics like

Need For Speed
Lightweight blue aerogrammes International airmail folded paper letters with blue and red coloured edges, because it was meant to go abroad

Money order
UPI transfer across geographies that involved the postman carrying money sent from afar

MS-DOS commands
Black screens and text input. Introduction to computers for a generation was in commands like DIR and CD

Netscape navigator
Web browser with a star logo. The Chrome browser of that era

Orkut
The social networking site from Google that became a thing in India and Brazil for some reason. Eventually made uncool by Facebook Pager numeric codes 143 for ‘I love you’, etc

Pager
If you’re wondering what a pager is, it’s a small device with a screen where numeric or short texts pop up. No, it’s not at all a mobile phone

Pen pals
Strangers, exchanging letters to build friendship or learn about each other’s cultures, often across countries

Phonograms
Recorded voice messages sent via post or telecom

Photo negatives
Kept in envelopes after the films were developed. People looked funny in ’em

Registered post
Signed acceptance and proof of delivery in the form of an acknowledgment card made this the blue tick for snail mail

Rotary dial telephones
Finger-wheel dialling of a phone, complete with a whirr sound. Dialling numbers would take as long as entire conversations

T9 predictive text
A way for folks to type fast on their alphanumeric mobile phone keyboards

Telegram
The original ‘instant message’ delivered via printed slips. They were short, urgent and always ending in STOP

Telephone directory
Imagine everyone’s number in your city in one book. It was the thickest book in most households

Telex
Pre-fax era long-distance text transmission

Traveller’s cheques
Instead of forex cards, these were physical papers with a prepaid fixed amount for when you travelled, and it worked like cash

Trunk calls
You booked a call via an operator for long-distance landline calls, who then called back once the call was connected. Yup, you could even take hours

Typewriters
Clack-clack and carriage return ding. Typing used to be a skill to be honed in institutes

VHS tapes
Video recording cassettes, which had to be rewound every time to get to the start

VCD players
The hardware used to play the VHS tapes

Walkman
Portable cassette players

Winamp
Skinnable music player, for those illegal MP3 songs

Y2K bug scare
The year 2000 brought about computer panic and pretty much created India’s IT boom

Yahoo! chat rooms
The OG of online mingling

Yahoo! groups
Pre-social media discussion boards

Yellow Pages
Another book, this time for business listings with addresses and contact numbers

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When the current generation looks back at the relics of our past, they may find it hard to believe that there existed a time when people spent hours on dial-up connections and queued up outside cyber cafés, all just to access the internet