All wired up

(Image courtesy: New Indian Express)

25 years of the PC. 15 years of the World Wide Web. And one day in the life of man. L Suresh reports.

"A man has been arrested in New York for attempting to extort funds from ignorant and superstitious people by exhibiting a device which he says will convey the human voice any distance over metallic wires so that it will be heard by the listener at the other end. He calls this instrument a telephone. Well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the human voice over wires."

This was a news item published in a New York newspaper, way back in 1868, when Alexander Graham Bell was trying to promote his pet invention. Ever since, well-informed people have been busy eating their words, and yet, have had enough left over to spend hours talking over the telephone. And over the years, one thing remained unchanged - man’s cynicism towards new-found technology.

Thomas J Watson predicted a world market for five computers, in 1943. Thirty-four years later, Ken Olson, President, Chairman and Founder of Digital Equipment Corporation would wonder why anyone would want a computer in their home. And in 1981, Bill Gates, who hadn’t yet thought of the road ahead, succumbed to the foot-in-mouth syndrome that had gripped his predecessors with the immortal words - ‘640 k ought to be enough for anybody’.

And life went on till 1991, when the next big wave hit the shores of technology and Walcott, Weekes and Worrell were displaced by another set of 3Ws that would be infinitely more popular - the World Wide Web. But more importantly, 25 years of the PC and 15 years of the World Wide Web have given us ten things that we just couldn’t have done without.

Dot Com Boom shake the room
50 lakh salaries, cars for 23 year olds, parties at the drop of a hat, three pay hikes in a year and – get a load of this – male strippers for a woman’s day party. As Charles Dickens put it, ‘those were the best of times, those were the worst of times’.

Indiaworld.com was bought from Rajesh Jain by Sify for a whopping Rs. 499 crores. Hometrade.com splurged Rs. 24 crores on an advertising blitzkrieg with Sachin, Shah Rukh and Hrithik. Indya.com got The Times of India to do what no other brand had done before – vacate its front page for a full-page ad. That was some life - until the lights at the end of the tunnel were switched off.

Portals shut down, retrenchments were the order of the day, pink slip parties followed. Go.com, Pets.com Flooz.com, eToys, Furniture.com – all the big names defied the laws of gravity on their way up, but faithfully conformed to the law of physics which said that everything that went up must come down.

A prêt line? I’ve lent my name to a virus!
Having a star in the Hollywood walk of fame was old hat. Having a virus named after you became the mark of celebrity status. Avril Lavigne, Anna Kournikova and Angelina Jolie – the biggest stars found themselves playing godmother to baby viruses that were unleashed across the network.

Kamasutra, Michelangelo, Melissa, I Love You, Code Red, SQL Slammer worm, MyDoom - the speed of attack, the reach and the aftermath increased with every passing generation of virus.

And of course, each virus not only spawned more of its kind, but also brought forth numerous spoofs – like the Bobbit virus, that would remove a vital part of the hard disk and then re-attach it, the Arnold Schwarzenegger virus that would terminate and stay resident (I’ll be back), the Star Trek virus that would invade the system in places where no virus had gone before, the Titanic virus that would make the whole computer go down and the Mike Tyson virus, that would quit after one byte.

Blame it on technology
As technology was increasingly being used to increase office productivity, it also had the opposite effect, with computer breakdown, hard disk crashes, UPS shutdown, network problems, lost files and all these leading to a 404 situation - employee not found.

Also, it gave the savvy employee ample opportunities to dodge a job coming his way. Reasons for delay could involve hot-swapping a bad disk from a UNIX box while building a file system on the newly inserted drive. Or an email database that was completely damaged when the mail template was accidentally replaced with a calendar template as 900 user systems were being replaced and their data migrated in a span of 25 days. (Of course, one could add to the complications by citing the fact that the main hub had to be accessed from some place north of Gautemala).

The result – the geeks were kept on their toes while the ‘it’s all greek to me’ kind took to their heels.

Hope you understand what I’m saying – I don’t
Another major advantage of the technology boom was that when all else failed, one could resort to jargon. Bandwidth, offline, network, real estate, stakeholder, eyeball, landing site – the 3Ws that led to the dot com era brought in new words that had multifarious meanings. Of course, leading the pack were three syllables that would thrill, chill and tide the world over a thousand years in the space of a night – Y2K.

And then, there were acronyms that caught everyone’s fancy – like PCMCIA (People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms), ISDN (It Still Does Nothing) and SCSI (System Can't See It).

I mailed to five people and got a Merc
Ever got cash from Microsoft, free merchandise from Nike or free cell phones from Nokia? Ever enjoyed a bit of good fortune, thanks to the Hawaiian Good Luck Totem or the Tweetie Bird Chain? Ever helped Bill Gates test a particular software or did your bit so that a dying girl could get into the Guinness Book of World Records? No?

Well, terrible things are likely to happen to you. Firstly, you haven’t complied with the request of flooding your friends’ inboxes. More importantly, you have broken the all-important chain, so not only will you bear a curse for life, but will also lose out on the opportunity to win a Merc or a thousand dollars from Bill Gates.

The Indian versions of junk mail tread on dangerous territory - names of Gods, religious heads, sacred chants and old age superstitions - that make it difficult for the recipient to ignore them. Of course, goodness comes in slabs, as your good fortune is directly proportional to the number of people you forward the mail to.

It’s okay Mom, I won’t disturb the net nanny
While most other technology-related industries were struggling with bandwidth, faster downloads and file sizes, the porn industry surged ahead, pushing the frontiers even as they managed high resolution images, video clips, payment gateways, member forums, streaming media, live webcam shows and above all, blazing download speeds.

While child lock programs like Cyber Patrol, Net Nanny, Bess, WebSENSE and SmartFilter tried their hands at restricting visitors to these sites, porn sites became the forbidden fruit of www.gardenofeden.com as kids who had mastered the art of hiding comic books inside their textbooks found no problems in circumventing the barriers and boldly going where no child was meant to go.

Hi, I’m Ted. Will you marry me?
Why mail someone when you could message them? This thought bubble popped up on screen as an instant messaging window and resulted in the first free to download instant messaging service in 1996 - ICQ. Others followed, like MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Skype, Google Talk and the Indian Rediff Bol.

The next step was networking – social networking, business networking, dating, meeting people, making friends and being part of larger forums. Community sites like Orkut, Ryze, Fropper, Gaia, Friendster and MySpace got into top gear.

But the Indian youth seemed to have very noble intentions, for after dating sites, matrimonial sites became a colossal hit. Shaadi.com and Bharatmatrimony.com found many takers with Jeevansathi.com coming a close third.

It says XL or XML. Which shall I buy?
It could have begun as cadabra.com, but instead became amazon.com and began operations in 1995, selling books. A year later, eBay came into existence. Suddenly the shopping cart had shrunk to the size of a tiny stamp while the shopping mall stretched right across cyberspace.

And as if to prove that life could be lived web hopping, Mitch Maddox hatched a plot that could be straight out of a tech Hollywood movie. On January 1, 2000 he changed his name to Dot Com Guy, moved into a bare house with nothing but a laptop and a net connection and stayed there for a whole year without any contact with the outside world.

It wasn’t just buying that caught one’s fancy – it was selling as well. Elise Harp from Georgia auctioned her pregnant belly as real estate for advertising. Amber Rainey followed suit and sported 'Golden Palace.com' on her pregnant stomach. Yet another woman, Angel Brammer from Scotland sold her bosom space for $4,050 for a fortnight. Meanwhile, Andrew Fischer of Omaha sold his forehead to a snoring remedy, SnoreStop for a month and netted $37,375. Kari Smith did the same and tattooed GoldenPalace.com on her forehead for $ 10,000.

It was not just people – even places got into the act. Halfway, a tiny town in the US changed its name to Halfway.com for a year and made $73,000 in the bargain.

Wait for the launch or download it now
Why wait for an album to release and buy the CD for an obscene amount when it can be downloaded in minutes from the net? Seven years ago, Shawn Fanning thought along similar lines as he made the latest hits available in mp3 formats and facilitated easy downloads and free exchange through napster.com. Of course, it was too good to last as a year later, Napster was sued for copyright violation and was forced to change to a pay site.

With audio sharing and downloading, video and mpeg clips followed with sites like Sideloading, Youtube and Google video becoming popular by the download. Apple bit into a huge chunk of the music industry with the iPod in 2001. In a year, the company sold over a million units of the music device. iTunes was launched a year later in 2003. By 2005, broadcast and webcast merged to result in podcast and if you weren’t following what was going on, you could well huddle in front of your radio and wait for the valves to get heated up before you tuned into Binaca geetmala.

My deep dark secrets I can’t tell a soul about
While the first blog started in 1994, it wasn’t until 1997 that the term weblog began to gain recognition. Two years later, in an attempt to break the term into two, weblog became we blog and eventually blog – the most endearing term to a billion writers around the world. By 2004, a new blog was being created almost every 7.5 seconds.

The blog by Chinese starlet Xu Jinglei on sina.com tops the list as the world's most popular blog, with over 50 million clicks and still counting. And Boing Boing is the most read group-written blog, enjoying over 68 million hits.

Back home, while most blogs are about personalized expressions, there are some others that serve as personal black books, containing the deepest, darkest secrets – about lusting after the neighbour’s wife, having a crush on the boss, voyeuristic exploits and erotic fantasies. They have one other thing in common – they are all maintained by brave souls who hide behind evocative aliases like Devoured Petals, Little Johnny and Been Stalked.

The time has now come to take the next leap into what one think will be the future of technology. 30 years ago, one thought that the PC wouldn’t find a place in the life of common man. And one seems to think that the PC will not find a place in the life of common man in the future as well, with mobile technology, wap, bluetooth and the www ganging up and putting the PC out of work. Of course, like everything else in life, that could well be misquotes on technology coming a full circle.

(Appeared in the New Indian Express Sunday Supplement on 24 September, 2006)