India Post's Registered Post service is retiring, prompting a nostalgic look back at pre-digital era relics. The article reminisces about dial-up internet, blue aerogrammes, and technologies like floppy disks and cassette tapes. It highlights the stark contrast between the slow-paced past and today's instant digital access, showcasing a world transformed by technology.
India Post recently announced that its Registered Post service, revered for legal proof and heartfelt messages, will retire on September 1, merging into Speed Post. In our office, the younger generation reacted with a “what service is that again?”, even as the oldies reminisced about “acknowledgment cards.”
That brought us here. Once upon a time, before swipe-rights and ChatGPT, there was a world where the loudest sound in a household was the screech of dial-up internet, where letters came folded in blue aerogrammes, and where an entire family’s weekend plan hinged on whether the Doordarshan antenna faced the right direction. Before emojis, there were pager codes.
Before Spotify, there was the mixtape cassette. Before Google Maps, there were fold-out atlases that never folded back in the same way. Here is a throwback list of things the younger lot may never know, but which once ruled the daily lives of your folks, when they were young.
A Guide to Millennial Childhoods
Airplane ticket booklets
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Yup, many of your folks’ first flight tickets were literally booklets.
AltaVista search engine Search, peaked before Google
AOL instant messenger Another messenger, this time with a distinct ‘door opening’ sound.
Ask Jeeves Search engine with a butler mascot, also peaked before Google
ASL pls The icebreaker in chatrooms that broke through internet anonymity. Stands for “age, sex, location please”
Betamax Sony’s failed video format Calling cards Scratch to reveal a PIN for payphone calls. Bought for a specific amount
Carbon paper For duplicate copies in forms and letters.
Cassette tapes Magnetic reels for music and data. Could be turned around for a whole new bunch of songs
CD tower stacks Spindles of blank CDs
CD-R and CD-RW drives Wanted to write something on a CD? You needed to burn it using one of these drives
Clippy The coolest virtual assistant ever. Siri, Alexa, eat your hearts out
Demand draft When a payment needed to be made, and a cheque wasn’t enough
Detachable car stereos It helped avoid car stereo theft. Yup, that used to be a problem.
Dot matrix printers Loud, perforated paper printing, still found at railway ticketing booths
Encarta Microsoft’s CD encyclopedia, which was supposed to replace huge volumes of Britannica from library shelves
Fax machines Curling thermal paper messages scanning letters across geographies
Film roll canisters Kodak or Fuji rolls in black cases, which needed a dark room to somehow become a photograph
Floppy disks (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 Loading... 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
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