A post in one of the blogs set me thinking............While big changes take place, one does not really realise it. It is
only many years later, one looks back and sees the big picture.
When I was working for my PhD, we used second gen IR spectrophotometers, but towards the end, there were some labs where you could get an FTIR done. It was remarkably better resolved, but still, I did not really appreciate the big leap in technology--just happy to be able to identify bands unambiguously. I left soon after that.
Similarly, I used to punch cards on noisy punching machines and submit a deck for running on the computer. We would get a printout next day. As I was finishing my thesis, the whole system got changed and we were allotted terminals to directly interface with the mainframe computer. We thought it was cool, but again, I left before I had a chance to really get to work on this.
Since I left the field of scientific work totally, I did not really understand the significant changes that took place in the early 80's in India.
It is now in retrospect, I see that those were significant times for chemists, when instrumentation improved in large spurts.
When I was working for my PhD, we used second gen IR spectrophotometers, but towards the end, there were some labs where you could get an FTIR done. It was remarkably better resolved, but still, I did not really appreciate the big leap in technology--just happy to be able to identify bands unambiguously. I left soon after that.
Similarly, I used to punch cards on noisy punching machines and submit a deck for running on the computer. We would get a printout next day. As I was finishing my thesis, the whole system got changed and we were allotted terminals to directly interface with the mainframe computer. We thought it was cool, but again, I left before I had a chance to really get to work on this.
Since I left the field of scientific work totally, I did not really understand the significant changes that took place in the early 80's in India.
It is now in retrospect, I see that those were significant times for chemists, when instrumentation improved in large spurts.
No comments:
Post a Comment