WWW 15 Years: A personal journey

Read more about this Internet God.

My Personal Journey

I am one of the fortunate ones who have seen the transition of the internet from early 1990s. No, I don't feel old by any means ;-) My early exposure to the internet was in 1990 in the form of University email. We were thrilled with just "text" emails. I don't recall using attachments. Corporates in the US were not having leased lines but were using UUCP to send and receive emails. The largest ISP was UUNET and it use to cause an arm and leg to have email facility at work.

The concept of www did not exist at that point of time. Gopher was talked about but not used a whole lot. Gopher is a distributed document search and retrieval network protocol designed for the Internet. Its goal was similar to that of the World Wide Web, and it has been almost completely displaced by the Web. I personally never got hooked onto Gopher as I did not find it very user friendly.

In early 1990s "Usenet" was the most popular internet application after email. I still like the Usenet forum as it gives me the feeling of a "community". Unfortunately Usenet today has been invaded by spammers. For those who would like to try Usenet I recommend you visit. It is nostalgic to find my postings from 1991 on groups.google.com [this was earlier called Dejanews.com]

Browser

I was first introduced to the internet by my colleague Brandon Goldfedder. He was a real hardware and software junkie. He had to try out every new toy that was being sold in the market. He called me one day and told me "Hey BG, see I can find some info related to India". There was really not much info related to India but was enough to satisfy a NRI like me who was starving for India related information.

I immediately bought a 14.4K modem and a dial up account for /month and started browsing the internet. Downloading Mosaic was a painful experience especially as the dial up connection was not very stable. Then came the browser revolution - Netscape, IE, Opera, Firefox. Getting the modem to work was no easy task, one had to install various packages on Windows 3.1 systems to get things to work.

I started my journey on WWW by building my personal homepage. Yahoo had just started. Not sure if the word 'portal' existed in 1994 but I am sure 'valuations' of internet companies did not exist ;-) Eventually I renamed my personal site as mahesh.com which was a household name in the US. There was just another serious player in the Indian internet space with me - IndiaWorld promoted by Rajesh Jain (sold to Sify.com in 1999). At that time having graphic backgrounds, heavy images for webpages was very popular!

Late 1990s

All major newspapers, magazines, portals carried a message on August 6 "Happy 15th birthday WWW". We are so accustomed to the internet today we cannot imagine what the world would be without the internet. Unfortunately the previous statement holds good only to the urban in India.

A Brief History

WWW" is Tim Berener Lees Baby. An invention through which all of us can get to know all other inventions. And he more than anyone else has fought to keep it open, nonproprietary and free- Thank you Lee.

The internet bubble burst in India was bad. There were too many players in the market and I knew none of them had the passion. Everybody was only after one goal - get listed on NASDAQ and make some quick bucks. They all got fried. I do feel proud to say that I survived that dotcom bubble, thanks to the good colleagues I had in [which I co-founded in 1999]. The survival did teach me a lot even though it is the basics of any business - concentrate on profits stupid and not eye balls and valuations. The market in 1999 forced you to concentrate on page views and completely ignore the revenues. In 2006 things look better but at times I do feel we are again entering the valuation frenzy game.

Downside Of Internet

While Internet has huge advantages there are disadvantages too. Writing letters is virtually gone. People prefer to write emails to writing letters. The art of writing almost died until Blogs became big. I always smile when people now say "Blogs have arrived, it is going to be big". As far as I am concerned it is just another new term but for the sake of valuations people come up with jazzy keywords. My good friend Vikas Kamat launched his portal kamat.com in 1996 and his blogs 'AnthoBLOGy ' as early as July 2001. There are many such good portals which very few are aware of, mainly because they don't spend on marketing and rely on word of mouth.

While free speech is good and a must in any 'true' democratic society it can and is being misused. After the unfortunate 7/11 bombing in Mumbai [which Mian Musharraf says he has nothing to do with it..ya sure] the Govt of India did something which it had never done before - block blogs in India which were a little more patriotic than what the Govt could digest. A real bizarre and stupid move. At the end of it those 8-10 blogs got excellent "free" media coverage. Wonder if their 'valuations' have gone up and any of them got any VC funding after that.

Minors have to be protected from pornography. Spammers are littering the internet but then many companies are thriving on building products that fight these spammers. Internet companies find it difficult to send genuine marketing mails as everyone is being painted as a "Spammer" by the same broad brush L

Internet In India

In India Internet was launched to the public on August 15, 1995. Before that accessing internet was extremely expensive hence not popular. VSNL was the only ISP till 1998. Getting a dialup account from VSNL was very painful, one had to fill forms, stand in long queues, pay by cash and get an account. In 1996 I had written about dial up accounts, you can read it here.

In November 1998, the Government ended VSNL's monopoly and allowed provisioning of Internet Services by Private Operators. The Terms and Conditions of the ISP's License were unusually liberal with no License Fee and allowed unlimited number of players. ISPs could set their own tariffs and even their own International Gateways. In 2000 India was experiencing such an Internet frenzy that Caltiger was offering free dialup accounts! Well the free lunch did not really last for long. At present India has 4.1 million internet subscribers.

Internet usage in India is still low but the growth has been encouraging since 2004. Currently Internet usage in India is limited to the urban area. Before 2004 it was limited to the 'elite'. Thanks to the dropping internet rates common man can afford to use the internet, rather today you cannot afford 'not' to use the internet. I hope what I say is true otherwise internet companies such as ours is in trouble!!

I strongly believe whatever one does it should change the lives of the common man. Sam Pitroda did that decades ago by forming CDoT and the telecom revolution started in India. Every village was connected after that revolution. I hope the same happens with the internet. The reach has drastically increased because BSNL has launched broadband services. Now we got to wait and see how many from Class B, Class C cities start using the net.

Having worked briefly at CDoT I always wanted to do something that would reach the masses. Dr. M. Vidyasagar, whom I admire immensely, advised me in March 1999 - "Mahesh, don't ignore Indian languages on the internet. You have to do something by which non-English speaking people in India too can benefit from the Internet". I took that very seriously and also saw it as an opportunity. In early 2000 I initiated the launch of South Indian languages on the internet, ie; Thatskannada, Thatstamil, Thatstelugu and Thatsmalyalam.

Many ask me even now - "BG, what should we do on the internet to hit it big?". My answer has always been the same "Do you have an idea and a passion? If so go for it. If it is just about money [i.e. greed] don't bother to take the journey". This I think holds good for any field and not just the Internet.

Luckily there was and is no license raj in India to start a portal! Unfortunately this still exists for the Radio world in India [See the inspiring story about Raghav Raj's radio station in Bihar].

Finally internet is about solving problems in a simple way. I strongly believe those who provide such solutions will succeed on the internet.

At the end of it all I can say is - Let the show go on...and thanks to all those who made Internet a possibility - you have given many of us a great career.

About the author

B G Mahesh is the CEO of Greynium Information Technologies Pvt. Ltd which owns Oneindia.in and a host of portals.