My first hands-on experience with a computer was in the early 90s when my aunt returned to India after a long stint in the Gulf with a Personal Computer. Soon, that piece of equipment came to occupy the pride of place in our household, complete with a special room fitted with an air-conditioner and peppered with anti-humidity sachets. The PC itself used to occupy a large part of the room, with the boxes of floppy discs that went into it consuming most of the remaining space.

But that was almost two decades ago. Last week, when Airtel installed its new Net PC at my home for a review, it struck me how much the computer had shrunk. The Nivio Companion unit on which the Airtel Net PC runs has a CPU which is not an inch bigger than the set-top-box that comes with my cable connection, a sleek 15” LCD monitor plus a regular USB mouse and keyboard. The whole unit was safely perched on a small side table—in fact, the modem that comes with the connection and the extension box to plug in the wires took up as much space as the unit.

But is the Net PC just a small PC? Well, no, there is more to it, or, lets say, less to it. This is literally an Internet computer since it is useless without a Net connection. So forget about switching on a ghazal to hum you to sleep at night.

The Nivio Companion, which surprisingly takes just a few seconds to switch on, comes to life only with the Airtel broadband cable plugged in. The desktop appears only when you have logged in to the server using your Nivio log-in ID and password. Everything on the desktop is familiar, except for the fact that there is no My Computer icon, for there is no hard drive so to speak on the CPU. While some software are pre-installed on the virtual desktop, more can be downloaded from a site which looks something like the iPhone app store.

... contd.