A Brief History of Internet (through my eyes)
Written on November 9, 2008 by Imran Mirza
It all started off in 1998 with a cyber cafe in Mumbai. Me and my friends came across this “coolest thing to do while bunking college” – internet surfing. It wasn’t cheap. Rs.80-100 per hour for a trip down the virtual world, but nothing could keep us away from the information superhighway
There were not as many sites to surf as we have today. There were hardly any search engines besides Lycos, Excite, Alta Vista and the cafe manager who “knew it all”. We registered our brand new email ID’s in Hotmail and Yahoo but we didn’t have anyone to send us email! So we made the best use of available resources and mailed each other, sitting in the same cafe. We even had our own ingenious “read receipt”, just get up and ask, “mail mila kya?” (got the mail?)
The first time I had an internet chat was in a Paralogic chat room. Soon I started using mIRC and things changed forever. A friend of mine taught me how to download mp3′s from IRC servers and then there was no looking back. I finally found a way to quench my thirst for classic rock.
Armed with my new US Robotics 56 kbps dialup modem and the humble MTNL internet connection, I started filling up my 15GB hard disk (it was the biggest one I could get at that time).
But the joy was short lived. Just two months later, I received the first bill from MTNL of Rs.12,000 and got my first reality check. The next bill was of Rs.7000 and I could see my dreams of having a big classic rock collection crumble in front of my monitor. I had heard stories of 1mbps internet connections from friends in the U.S.
Just then, cable internet came to the rescue. With 64kbps of unlimited, always on internet, I felt I could download the entire internet on my hard disk. However, the stories of 1mbps connections still haunted me.
Now almost 10 years down the line, I finally have a 1mb connection in my office. I can download anything I want at 250kbps. I already have all the classic rock I need. B l i s s…
But wait, I just read about T3 connections.
“Human wants are unlimited.” – some famous guy
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