From Dial-up to Hi-speed Broadband… Do you also live internet? [TDIS]

You know, like many others, I’ve been using internet since that dial-up era in India. I still remember that black colored terminal window where I used to login with pre-paid Mantra online, Sify and MTNL internet account.

The dial-up era was so frustrating; first you needed to dial to some phone number so that the modem could establish a connection between your computer and the ISP. The entire experience was so irritating and annoying. And all you were getting was just 56kbps of internet connection, which was sad!

And, don’t ask me about the telephone bills, one hour of usage meant you had to loosen your pocket by 50-60 bucks!!! With monthly bills soaring in thousands, only I know what excuses I used to give to my parents. (exam results?)

And then came the so called Broadband Era. In India, they would even call a 128kbps connection as “hi-speed broadband”. With pictures of actress Sonali Bendre on the billboard advertisements, I fell into the marketing gimmicks and finally decided to go for Sify’s 128kbps broadband.
Since there was no YouTube in that era, I was totally enthralled with my broadband speed (now I wonder why). My downloading needs were just sufficient to be always below the cap limit, which was just 400MB / month at that time.

And now has come “The age of Bandwidth”. With 1 mbps unlimited connection speed, I am the King of the Internet. From downloading as many movies I want, to watching all popular YouTube videos till you declare a night out, I can just do anything!

Things I used to do in the dialup era?

With no social networking then, I wish if I was born a little later, mostly everybody used to check emails, chat on IMs. ICQ and Yahoo Messenger were the most popular IMs for chatting then. And not to forget the chat rooms that Yahoo used to have then. From geeky talk to pervert ones, it was enough to make your day.

Flash games were not very popular then, but there were few JavaScript games that you could play online in multi-player modes. Games like Word Racer, Scrabble etc was very popular then.

What do I do now?

I don’t think I need to tell that to anybody. “Social” is the buzz word now. I used to be a fan of Orkut once, but Facebook has just stolen away my zeal to even login into Orkut even once a day at least.

YouTube, Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Reddit, Slashdot, Google are just enough for me to spend my whole day in front of my high def LCD screen. Of course, I am not forgetting xkcd, dilbert, C&H and so many other cool funny things that get delivered to my email every day.

And, with this rising blogging culture, I for once have extreme flare for it too. I wish we things like WordPress, Twitter, Friendfeed earlier, because I just don’t love Internet, I live Internet. What about you?

[Editor’s Note: This article is submitted by Himanshu. He blogs at whibb about tech stuff.

This article is part of new section TDIS (Thank Devil Its Sunday!). Read more about this section.]