10 years of the internet

I got my first computer in May 1999. It was a smart looking Compaq Presario with a 333Mhz Celeron processor, 32 MB RAM, 4 MB VRAM, 128KB L2 Cache, 4GB Hard Disk, a state of the art machine which cost my father a fortune and most importantly came with an inbuilt 56Kbps modem!

The new machine came bundled with a Satyam internet starter pack that gave me a total of 25 hours access to the internet.

It was any 15 year olds dream come true, a gadget for games, music, movies and fun along with a chance to get online and have my own e-mail account!!!

As we entered 2010 i remembered the most crazy thing i did at the fag end of 1999 (or atleast i thought it was quite a crazy thing to do). It was the year of the Y2K bug, doomsday was predicted and i was expecting the worst ... It was the last day of the year, being in between my pre-final exams the only celebration was with the family and at precicely 11:00 p.m. everybody retired to bed to prepare for a long new years day. I remember my first real encounter with the internet was around 11:45 p.m. December 31st, 1999. Inspite of all warnings from my parents to stay away from the computer, i thought "wtf", what could go wrong? After all billions of dollars were spent on fixing the Y2K bug right? A thought struck me, i should be celebrating my entry into 2000 by getting into a chat room and seeing what could go wrong ... would planes really come crashing down all over the US, would Russian ICBMs be triggered off due to a faulty code patch or would the internet fall apart at the precise moment of 00:00:00 hours!

Those were the days when chat rooms were really chat rooms, untouched by bots, real people discussed real issues in a common window. I think i logged in to Rediff Chat and entered one of those general rooms. The mood was quite light and everybody was talking of what was happening ... there were folks from Japan, Singapore, HongKong where dawn had broken in the new year and things were going just fine ... and slowly as the clock inched to 00:00:00 IST there were wild jubilations around and there was nothing that seemed out of the ordinary!

I went to sleep at 12:45 a.m. after getting a confirmation that Pakistan too has survived the entry into Y2K ...

It has been 10 years of using the internet since then, from being a tool to keep in touch with friends, to a source of all those adolecent porn, to being a source of all my music and movies, and culiminating in being my indispensible companion in all my college projects, it has been a faithful comapnion and perhaps the most useful tool i have used in my life ...

Here's a toast to the greatest technological invention of all times that has served me well for the past 10 years!