From the dork era to the dark ages

A brief Asimov-esque history of the digital era – from the very beginning – and all that which followed…

First there was nothing. I mean, what else would you call 640 kB of memory, despite the fact that Bill Gates is supposed to have stated that ‘640K ought to be enough for anybody’? He never did, but as Mark Twain purportedly said, why let facts get in the way of a good story?

Then came primitive computers with floppy disks – and evolution chugged along at the speed of Mega Hertz. The arrival of the Stone Age was announced by the assault of the Stone virus. The Iron Age began when Big Irons, as mainframe computers were called, bullied their smaller counterparts in tech labs.

All this technology was alienating people from one another. Man being a social animal, had to network. He began one-to-one communication with select people, sending long, passionate pieces to his ex-girlfriends, sharing spicy gossip with his college friends and shooting off angry rants to his colleagues. Since anything that’s passionate, spicy or ill-tempered generally increases ambient temperature, he wanted to call this phenomenon hotmail. But it turned out that the name was already taken, so he took a different route. ‘What do my ex-flames, friends and colleagues have in common?’ he asked himself. It turned out to be the two letters, ‘e’ and ‘s’. A name like ‘smail’ would remind people of a slow slug, so he named his creation email.

But emails could be sent only to people whose ids he had. He wanted to clog the cyberworld with his strong opinions on everything. It didn’t matter whether people liked it or not – he would bash on regardless. ‘Boldly clog’ became his mantra which, as with all things tech, was abbreviated to blog.  Soon, all those who fancied themselves as writers began blogging. The converse also became true - all those who blogged began fancying themselves as writers and began getting their blogs published as books. Since no one reads books, this unwise move sounded the death knell for blogs.

Suddenly people wanted something shorter - no one had the time for long-winding rants. It was a huge challenge. “If you can manage it, you should give us all a tweat,” said Elmer J Fudd, Bugs Bunny’s nemesis, obviously referring to a party without carrots. Soon 140 characters came together and created short messages that came to be known as tweets. And so life went on.

Then came the Dark Ages – power cuts. Without electricity, mails, blogs and tweets became virtually impossible. The elders went into their customary huddle, fanning themselves with their MacBook Air – there was little else they could do with it now. After days of debate, they finally emerged, tired but triumphant.

“We’ve created the perfect alternative to email, blogs and tweets,” they announced and held up three sheets of paper. “This blue one will carry your email,” they proclaimed. “Once you’ve composed your mail, just fold it, stick it and send it. This yellow one,” they held up an A5 sized rectangular sheet of thicker paper, “will carry your blog”. And this white sheet of folded paper will carry your tweets like a ticker tape message pasted on it. We have even created standard tweets for you to choose from, for specific occasions.”

That was how the inland letter, postcard and telegram came to be. And technology reigned supreme ever after.