My Internet History

I remember it precisely. The year was 2001; I had just finished my 10th grade board exams, never used internet before. I went to a local cyber café for the first time, and asked them to help me setup an email id. Rediff.com was pretty popular at that time in India. I signed up, my name is Kartik Vyas, I tried for an id like kartikvyas@rediffmail.com, it was already taken, and this is a pretty common combination. I tried some more combinations, didn’t work, finally I ended up  with myhearwiillgoonkartik@rediffmail.com...it sounds pretty funny now, but I was pretty new to the internet then.

As far as technology is concerned, we had dialup internet at that time, when I first got internet at home. In the cyber café I am not sure, may be they might have had cable connection, but still it was not broadband, I am pretty sure! I used to go a lot to the cyber café, Yahoo Messenger was a big craze then, going in to public chat rooms, and then trying to start up a conversation with strangers. I think the last I remember; I had around 120 strangers in my Yahoo friends list! J

Another thing I used to do a lot was search for wallpapers of cars, and cinema celebrities, and email everyone, I was one hell of a spammer then! I used to also send e-cards to friends and relatives. I was also using email to be in touch with my long distance relatives. There was no social networking back then, no WhatsApp or Facebook.

Also I had my first desktop computer at home in 2003 before I started undergrad studies, I think it had a floppy drive, which is not seen these days! I don’t remember the configuration exactly but I guess it was Pentium 4 maybe and 256MB of RAM. Comparatively I have a DELL mini monster laptop now, it has 8GB RAM, 750GB hard disk, 1 GB inbuilt video graphics, and second gen Core i5, I got this back in 2011, and it was my second laptop.

I started my undergrad studies in Computer Engineering, and I can definitely say the initial stint with the internet had a big influence on my decision, I had curiosity to know how things work, and I wanted to learn it all. During engineering I learnt programming, I learnt RDBMS, and many other courses, I used to use internet voraciously to do research related to my courses. In my university we used to have well equipped labs, but it was only for study purpose, only faculty had internet access, and they had broadband connection.

Social networking started for me around 2006, I started using Orkut, and I remember it was exciting and a bit addictive too. In 2008 I got an invite from a friend to use facebook, compared to orkut I found facebook interface of 2008, a bit less user friendly, but then slowly facebook started gaining ground and we all know the rest!

After I graduated I got a job in a big MNC, I worked for 3 major clients. Everything was online, we were working for big clients and dealing with a lot of sensitive data, and had a lot of responsibility. There were 3 level access till I could reaches my cubicle! J

One thing I am proud of is a failed startup I had back in 2010. Cloud computing was a novelty then, I had done some research, and was planning to build a startup to provide cloud based solutions for business users. I had commodity and retail market in mind. I also had registered a domain, and designed my site from godaddy.com. It was not in India back then, and I had paid them in dollars, they had a ton of tools to work with. Everything was there, only I was still nascent and could not build a working product. Eventually I thought of trying again later when I am more prepared and more experienced.

I used to do a lot of research at that time, wrote papers about Cloud computing and SOA. The passion and curiosity I had when I started using internet in 2001, I still had it in 2010 and I still have it now. Although due to time constraints of a full time job, I cannot do much research but I try to do as much as possible, I read a few papers and saw some videos on BigData last year, I also completed a course on coursera itself of the same.

So, this is my own history of the internet! Hope you had liked it!

*I had submitted this essay as part of the Coursera IHTS course of University of Michigan. I am publishing this now as grades are declared. Please do not copy for any future sessions of this course.