my Briefcase of zeroes and ones

Yes I live in the past too; I think my days of secondary school were the days I had the most fun, and definitely one major contribution came from my involvement in my co-curricular activity, the uber cool computer club. Haha.

As mentioned before I was in Multimedia group, creating animations and games using the then Macromedia Director, which was a forerunner to the now-so-popular Flash from the same company [now all bought over by Adobe].

Unlike my good friends who did programming or micromouse, where source codes were in mere kilobytes, Director files could go up to megabytes, easily balloon-ed up as we kept adding in elements.

[Flash uses primarily vector graphics, thus file size can be kept small. Director takes in anything from bitmaps to MP3s to AVIs to entire Flash files.]

Well the word 'megabytes' doesn't raise any fear in anyone today anymore, since space is now dirt cheap and redundant. Back in the good old days of secondary school, however, the only form of storage I had came in the form of...


Image koped from Wikipedia

...where all it could take was 1.44MB worth of things [its really 1.38MB only]. CD-rewritable drives were expensive then thus I could not afford them. Not to mention external hard disks or USB thumb drives, if they were already in existence then.

To bring a Director file simply from home to school or from school to home was one big headache, especially once the total space required exceeded the size of one floppy. Therefore we had to come up with all sorts of methods to circumvent the lack of space.

One method was:



Yes its WinZip, used back then when Windows did not come with its own compression software. I would use WinZip to compress my files to squeeze into the floppy, but when even the compressed file was too big for it, it had the ability to span the compressed files over several floppy disks!

Another method I could use was via the Internet, after I just got my 56k modem haha. Back then there was neither Megaupload nor Mediafire; there was no Gmail yet, and Hotmail only provided a miserable 10MB[?] of space allowing only 1MB[?] of attachments.

In comes [Finally at the main topic. I sincerely apologise for my long-winded-ness] Yahoo Briefcase! It provided a generous [by standards then] 30MB of space, and had no attachment limits.


One that I created together with my friends. Brotherhoodofevilhelldeath. Haha.

With space constraints gone, my Internet speed became my limiting factor. With download speeds at 56kbps and upload speeds at 33.6kbps[?], one upload could take hours!

Anyway the reason why I talked about this is because Yahoo sent me an email yesterday, that they will be closing down Briefcase soon, asking us to save all our files inside.

With the abundance of USB thumb drives and external hard disks running into the gigabytes and terabytes, and with new startups like Megaupload offering gigabyte worth of space, Yahoo's 30MB 'briefcase' isn't that attractive now, and its closing down should be seen as a matter of 'when' rather than 'if'.

Nevertheless Yahoo Briefcase has played an important role during my days of fun; more than just providing me the ability to bring my things around, it has also become a time capsule of sorts for me. Even now I enter the username and password of this Briefcase it still gives me a good chuckle.

Thank you Yahoo Briefcase!

Last but not least some other little graphics I did back then:






Can you see which part of the world this is? Lol.




For the above two pictures, I drew the arms [and the bird] myself. It was also a modification from a ClipArt picture like the 'wildman'. It was meant to show 飞鸽传书. Haha.