The Potential of Granular Spatial Data

Abstract

I was pursuing my Ph.D in the early 1990 s at the Department of Economics, University of Mumbai. We had a computer room with two desk tops, and a software called Lotus 123. Lotus 123 used to be the go to thing for all things, just like Excel today. One of the desktops was a basic machine, and the other was a more advanced machine called AT, which stood for”advanced technology”. Since there were only two desktops, we had to queue up to use them, after filling a register in advance. I thought that buying a machine for personal use would be expensive, but a good investment for the future. So, I bought a personal desktop, which cost me about 35,000 rupees in 1992, more than a year’s worth of my salary at that time. Since I was investing for the future, I bought a machine that would be enough for my computing needs for a decade (at least that is what I thought at that time). My friends chided me for wasting money on the excess computing capacity, far beyond what I would ever need. Let me tell you the configuration of the then power house of a computer: it had a sprawling hard-disk of 10 MB, and a RAM of 640 KB. Today, you will not buy a mobile phone with that configuration.