Times have changed for Niket Vaidya. A surfing guru five years ago, he now stands with his hands on his hips, shaking his head as I tell him about the surfing habits of a younger guy called Mrinal Gurbaxani. In terms of age, a mere five years separates the two. In Internet time, however, that amounts to their being a generation away from each other.
Ladies and gentlemen, moving beyond the cultural and familial, that old phenomenon we call a 'generation gap' has entered the virtual world.
Let's look at a few facts to get a clearer picture. Sometime in 1995, Niket browsed using Netscape 0.9 and a black-and-white monitor. He had a single Hotmail account, chatted using MIRC and Talk City, and paid a whopping Rs 18, 000 for a 500-hour TCP/IP account. His pride and joy, back then, was a set of movie clips and MIDI files.
Cut to Mrinal Gurbaxani, in the year 2001. He uses a 21-inch colour monitor, has multiple email IDs, chats up women on MSN and Rediff Bol, paid a measly Rs 999 for four months of unlimited access, and boasts 600 MP3s on his hard disk.
When Niket began his journey on the World Wide Web, something as mundane as the ability to clear his cache made him cool. For Mrinal, the possibility of not being online doesn't even exist.
How many remember the Internet's arrival in India? The first ripples began with nondescript electronic communities called BBS or bulletin board services. Suchit Nanda, in 1989, launched the first one in Mumbai from his bedroom, using a DOS-based shareware and 1200 bps modem. He had around six users dialling in between 10 pm and 7 am, to chat with strangers sharing similar hobbies.
"A computer and modem was all it took. The possibility of chatting with people from different walks of life, along with a large collection of shareware and freeware, is what attracted people to BBS," he recalls. About his huge telephone bills of Rs 20,000 a month, he adds, "We lived with a 1200 bps modem, happily. Now, life with even 10 times that speed is unimaginable."
All has changed. From the initial wonder it inspired, the Internet now spawns cynicism; from a luxury it has become a necessity. Even people associated with designing amateur Web sites remember the old days. Malay Nagda, one such designer, says: "We would help clients with nitty-gritty like getting email accounts and even answer silly calls like 'My Internet is not working' "
That was how most surfers lived, till 1995, the year the Internet swept the US.
For us, in India, first came the 'TCP/IP' and 'shell' accounts, with the latter giving you nothing but text, and more text. It was affordable at Rs 500 for 500 hours, but could put one off surfing completely, thanks to pathetic connections. Worse still, there was no mouse, just keyboard-based operation. With these accounts came tales of stolen passwords and IDs of corporate TCP/IP accounts. A far cry from today, where Mrinal and his siblings discuss the pros and cons of their five ISPs. Uday Cheruvuru, 22, goes a step further refusing to get online without his high-speed broadband connection.
The generation gap doesn't make much sense to guys like Uday and Mrinal, simply because they've never known a life without the good stuff. Veteran Ruchir Joshi remarks, cynically, that today's users start surfing at high-speed Net cafes and take the Internet and its speeds for granted.
Ask early users about our terribly important email, and the answers are surprising. Hotmail, one of the first free services, didn't have a password retrieval system then, and came minus a spam filter. Today, even seven-year-olds know how to block spam. Malay shudders: "The time it took to send email in those days was more than that taken to have a cup of tea in Japan."
More changes occurred. There were browser issues, newer versions (of just about everything) launched every two months, and long discussions on usability and strategies in chat rooms. Malay elaborates: "Lynx browsers could not understand cookies. For others who grew up on IE, these browsers were shocking with their lack of icons. Access to anything was only by prompt commands."
Chatting has changed, too, from IRC to our many emoticons on MSN and Yahoo! Mrinal swears by his instant messengers, but knows precious little about their rustic predecessors. Another perceptible change: whom we chat with. It's caution all the way, unlike the good old days when anyone and everyone could come in and yap their heads off.
Search engines have become incredibly accurate, and even pornography has seen some drastic transformations. "Before live nude streaming video, there was ASCII porn," says Niket. Spelled 'pr0n', it comprised erotic art created using the ASCII character set - alphabet, numbers and assorted punctuation marks!
"Today's kids would be surprised to see what can be done with little more than a deftly placed comma and a whole bunch of ampersands," smiles Niket, who once spent three evenings with friends, trying to make a nude poster.
There you have it, then. The yesterdays and today. No speeds and broadband. Cultural changes and technological breakthroughs. The only things that remain relatively untouched are demands made online. In those days, Malay cribbed about low speeds, fewer Indian sites and simpler pages. Suja, today, wants free PC-to-phone dialling, better speeds and more information.
Maybe some things will never change.
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