The Silver Jubilee of the Internet!
On this very day, the 15th of August, the Internet was made open for the common public of India, 25 years ago! It was our 49th Independence Day then, today we celebrate our 74th. Since then, it has travelled far from what it was, to what it is now. From a Rs. 15000/year, 9.6 kbps pack (which was breathtaking by those standards, mind you) which just gave 250 hours of internet time for the whole year, to the present day figures which are around 4000 times faster, all for a fraction of amount from before! From those large 'Floppy Disks' which had just a minuscule capacity of 1.44 Mbs, to the present day pen-drives and even cloud services which can store data in Tbs!
From those 23,500 sites, to the 1.8 billion websites now [according to Internet Live States]
The list is endless, but one thing we can say for sure is that with the introduction of the internet, the former "roti, kapda, makaan" has changed to "roti, kapda, makaan, aur bandwith" Yes, internet has come a long way and I just can't imagine what it was like before. What could you even store in 1.44 mbs? And rather than waiting for my game to load at 9.6 kbps, I might as well study!
A world without internet is simply unimaginable [at least for us, as we never saw one]. It has become such a crucial part of our lives, that it almost seems so normal. But, when I read a few articles on the times when internet was new, and nobody considered it as a necessity [nobody actually considered it as anything, to be honest], I couldn't believe what I was reading. There were times when the broadband and the phone line were connected through one single wire, so if you picked up the phone, the internet would shut down. And now we have seamless connectivity at 6 a.m. in the morning and at 6 p.m. in the evening. This tells us how far we have come, and how far we will go. The future, is all based on internet.
IoT (Internet of Things) is the thing to talk about, self-driving cars, smart lights, smart doors, smart toilets, you name it, and it will run on internet.
Artificial Intelligence is another revolutionary part of technology, which is a game-changer. It has been around for a few years, but we are yet to see its full potential in use. The first A.I. system was used way back in 1955, to solve a few math theorems. Now research is going on to use it in self-driving cars, healthcare, and much much more [including robots of course!]. There is also cloud computing to talk about. It is an on-demand availability of computer software resources, especially data storage. It has transformed the field of data storage, and has made those huge server rooms obsolete. Now you can store more data than you could with those expensive and huge servers on much cheaper cloud systems.
Internet has also brought us various new ventures such as the Bitcoin. It basically is a type of a cryptocurrency, which is a digital asset, similar to the stock market, but on the internet, and they, in-turn are based on another technology, blockchain.
It has also transformed learning and education. We can do our whole research in a few clicks [take me, for example], and we get all the information we need in front of us, in seconds!
There are so many things the internet has brought us, that I practically can't cover them all. But I just couldn't miss out on this one small thing, social media. The first one was created in 1997 and was called 'Sixdegrees', which had about a million users during it's peak. It also lead the way for Orkut, AOL, Yahoo Messenger, and also Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp as we see it today. Internet has [fortunately and unfortunately] become the number one place for people to meet, greet and socialize.
After all this, we also realize that how much creativity and innovation are important for the growth of the internet. If it had not been them, it wouldn't have had the boom it had. The more creative you could [and still can] get, the bigger gold mine you will get.
I believe, no other invention has changed our lives so drastically, [apart from fire, of course], and no other will. But like always, things like these, which are out of our imagination, may seem to be a part of a routine life 25 years ago.
Do let me know what you think could become "the thing" in the future, be it advances and some new technology related to the internet or some other new giga-gadget, in the comments below!
Here's to the future and the next 25 years! 😃
Happy Independence Day to All!