It was in 1992, in my engineering college days in Pune, that I encountered the Internet.
it was experimental and was totally Unix-command driven, though very exciting even then to a young, curious mind.
I later became part of the largest (and first) bulletin board system (BBS) called Live Wire BBS, run from Powai, by Suchit Nanda, where I made friends, and actually was more comfortable communicating online than in person. I remember the comforting screech of the modem as it connected to the server at the other end after we dialled (‘ATDT <phone number>’, I remember) and hoped there was an available line for us.
I remember learning, and using all these ‘emoticons’ (I don’t think we called them that then) with much ease, even to the point of using them when they could only be understood by someone who could see the connection, like saying, ‘.wave’ instead of just ‘Hello’, or using the names preceding our posts creatively, like ‘<kedar gadgil> waves enthusiastically’. Even the use of taglines (‘To see a hidden message, hold down Ctrl, Alt, and Del buttons together’) in our mail continued for a very long time, even when we started using the real Internet!
I met some great people at Live Wire, made some great friends (Neville, JJ, Deepak, Sughyosha, Punky, G10, and many more), and have some very fond memories of that time. I even met my first wife, Vaishali, there. She used to work as Systems Operator, SysOp2; I was Phaedrus. Yeah, I know, we were all a bit pompous then.
Of course, I was one of the first people to subscribe to email (AxcessMail, does anyone remember that?), then the internet (that came to India on the midnight of 14 August 1995), and also the Apple eWorld (does anyone remember this one?), and finally, the whole Internet revolution with digital communication.
Indeed, I consider myself to be a child of the internet. Did you know that the Internet as we know of it today (the World Wide Web) came into being in 1990, a year I turned 18, myself coming of age!
Today is the 25th anniversary of one of the acronyms I learnt back then. Ladies, and gentlemen, please put your hands together for “LOL”. Happy silver jubilee to you, my friend.
.smile
