My Chronicles: The Internet

This is an attempt to chronicle my experiences with the internet over the years. I had nothing else to write. So please bear with me! 

Google

The first time I heard of Google was sometime in 2001. I knew about other search engines at the time- like AltaVista, Yahoo and a few others. But I had never heard of Google. When one of my friends told me about Google, I thought he was joking. What a silly name! ‘What does it mean?’, I had asked him. He didnt know. So I went to a cyber cafe next day, just to check out Google. At the cafe, after I got a computer for myself and started the browser (Netscape Navigator- You remember that, dont you?), I realized that I had forgotten the name. Gogol? Goggle? So I kept trying the combinations and one of the combinations even opened up a porn site. (I was too young at the time to know what it was. So I just closed it! More on porn later!)  

Finally when I hit upon the right combination of letters- GOOGLE, I was ecstatic. I was a big time user of AltaVista at the time, and suddenly the simple-looking no-clutter site looked refreshing. It took very little time for me to realize the difference in the quality of search results. I remember the first thing I searched for in Google. It was ‘BR Hills’. I was doing a mini project at school and I was amazed at the way Google dished out results just the way I was hoping for. 

Last Friday, I counted the number of times I googled. Before lunch, the count had reached 17.  I lost count after lunch. My guess is that I google atleast 35 to 40 times a day on an average. And everytime, the time taken from the moment a query props up in my mind to the moment I get the required result on google is, astonishingly, less than a minute. 

From being a vague idea in some garage in Menlo park to becoming an indispensible part of our lives, what a journey it has been. 

E-mail

I created my first e-mail id on Yahoo. It was way back in 1998 and it happened on my first visit to a cyber cafe. That particular cafe prided itself as being Bangalore’s first cyber cafe. I dont know if that was the truth, but the sad thing is that the cafe no longer exists. A dentist sits in the same place now. By the way, this was in Rajajinagar’s Bashyam circle- so if any of you reading this knows about it, please let me know.  

My second e-mail id was on usa.net. You will remember how usa.net ceased to provide free e-mail service after some time. There were a few predictions in newspapers that e-mail wont remain free after some time and that everyone will go the usa.net way. Thankfully those free email providers found ways of sustaining themselves and here we are, reaping the benefits. 

And then in a few months, I had countless email ids. Creating new e-mail ids became a fancy. Fortunately (yeah!), I forgot the usernames and passwords of most of them, and right now, I only manage Yahoo and Gmail. 

Porn

Is it illegal to write about porn? I dont know. Anyways, it was a day in 2002.  I went to a cyber cafe to check my mail. I never used to get any mails, but I had to log in once a month to ensure that my id wasn’t snatched away from me. It was about 11 in the morning and the cafe owner said they had no systems free. But I could see one system which no one was using. I asked the guy if I could use the free one. He immediately asked, ‘What do you want to do?‘ I was surprised. ‘What does that mean?‘, I asked. ‘I asked you what you want to do on the internet‘. I said ‘email‘. No one had asked me such questions in a cafe before. ‘That system is not for you. Come back after some time‘, he said. I insisted that I had a very small job to do and I can complete my work in 5 minutes. He reluctantly agreed and added ‘only email, ok?‘ 

It took me less than a minute to discover why he was reluctant to let me use that system. I opened IE, clicked on the drop-down arrow of the address bar. I expected to see Yahoo mail there but all I saw were weird names. Most of the sites had the word ’sex’ either suffixed of prefixed in the site names. I ignored them, opened yahoo and signed out a few minutes later.  My job was over, and thats when the temptation began. Let me open just one. Just to see what these sites have. Look if anyone is watching you. I clicked on the drop-down. Look if someone is seeing. I had to select one. Which one? Next to one of the sites’ name, it said ‘world’s best porn site’. I clicked on it. The page turned white and the hour-glass appeared as it took time to load. That is when I discovered that my heart beat rate had increased. I am doing a serious crime. Look if the owner is watching. And then, the page opened completely. The pictures came up. My heart was galloping. I had had enough. I closed it, paid for the time and ran home. 

It took three days for me to get rid of the feeling of guilt. The nightmares were horrific. I was 16 then.

Blog

I started this blog just because everyone I met had a blog. When I started, I had no idea for what purpose I wanted to use it. My first post on this blog was a quiz. And my first long article was something about the Guantanamo bay prison. I remember how I wrote that article first on a sheet of paper, the night before my CO exam and then after the exam, I copied the entire thing onto my blog.