Change and Growth

Since the Internet became popular, many sites has come and gone. Orkut, a social networking site from Google once popular in the Indian subcontinent is going to die on the 30th of September, 2014. Recently, I was going through an old promotional video to the Internet. It looked a bit odd and irrelevant, though it could be a useful guide for the kids in 1997, 17 years ago. We do not honestly know when will the current Internet giants see their end. Probably, one day they will. Hope the transition will be gradual, and when that happens we will be given option to download our data from the sites.

Many of the sites have disappeared since they made this video. Yahooligans was a search engine for the kids. Sometimes, I do not understand why a few websites disappear, even when they are backed by an Internet giant such as Google or Yahoo. This probably could be due to their lack of ROI. They could at least consider donating these web sites to some open source projects, as Google did with Wave, instead of killing them. Some of the web sites mentioned in the video, such as nick@nite and ticketmaster still exist for more than 17 years. Juno has changed its business since then, from free email provider to dial-up internet service. Interestingly, the not-so-fancy online virtual frog dissection tool still exists, without modification or improvement. An equally interesting video was a compilation of Microsoft advertisements from Windows 1.1 to Windows 8. The early advertisements indeed look goofy, with lack of professionalism compared to the current standards.

I remember, buying a computer of 40 GB disk on the 6th of January, 2006, which was perfectly enough for Windows XP and Mandrake Linux dual boot. This February 11th, I bought a laptop of 1 TB, and having a dual boot of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS - 64 bit and Windows 8. I have already filled up half of the space! Same can be said about the memory and CPU, where those days tinier resources were more than enough for running all the applications. I used to store documents in 1.44 MB floppy disks, downloaded from the University internet. Now not even a single document can stay inside such a small space. These changes were within 8 years. Probably, by 2022, I will have more to say here, that is, if Blogger still exists by then.