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The idea of writing a series like Human Technology provides me to reflect on my own journey through the IT age that is so central to my life. Technologies that have been featured so far on iRohit.com have today become so ingrained in our fabric that it’s easy to disregard the fact that till the mid nineties, most of us didn’t even know how a PC looked or what Windows was.

As I write this, the 4th chapter of my ongoing Human Technology series, I have to mention, none of the previous topics have brought a bigger smile on my face than this one. Before the BitTorrent, LimeWire, Kazaa; there was a lone pioneer, who unlocked the gates to a whole new world of sharing, sharing of music to be precise. Napster!

Napster was a brain child of 18 year old Shawn Fanning who I guess, was very passionate about his music, like most of us. But unlike most, he was brilliant with computers and coding. So he created a piece of software that would allow him and his colleagues to search and download the music of their liking from the computers on his college network. Little did he realize at that time that, what he had created was a piece of code that would change the music industry! We all are aware with the history of course. Napster changed the way we got our music. One was able to search for music on any computer located anywhere in the world and download it on to his computer. Foul, cried the music industry, but that didn’t stop this phenomenon of sharing music. Napster doesn’t even exist anymore. Well, definitely not in its original form. The original Napster has mutated into many things. Today’s it most successful form is the BitTorrent.

For many people, around the world, Napster provided a way to listen to music without actually owing it. It helped people to find that most obscure of artist in a jiffy. All it required was for some patient person to rip the cd and make mp3s of the album and share it. The copies then just grew in geometric progression. Today one can share not only music, but books, movies, software, documents, presentations, well almost any file on the computer. Of course there are legal suits going on, preventing such peer to peer sharing. But then that is a topic for another blog. The point of this blog is to acknowledge the place of Napster in Internet folklore. It added a whole new dimension to Internet. Music is one thing that unites the world, and sharing and finding music connected with the masses. As they say, ‘music is the food for our soul’ and I guess the entire world is hungry!

Incase you found this blog interesting, I would recommend you look at my other posts from the Human Technology series. Let me know which technologies touched you. I would love to hear you views.

What more do I have to say. This one uncanny word has today become synonymous with goodness, nobleness, ‘do no evil’, usefulness, innovation, user centric principles, almost miraculous products… the list could go on. Google has touched our lives in some way or the other and for good. What started with a simple page with a colorful name which fetched precisely the results that you wanted in .232 odd secs has today become the biggest brand in the world. Though search is still its core, it today provides an amazing mix of services to all the netizens, and for free. Today you can mail, chat, find directions to that new restaurant that your friend told you about, publish your thoughts, ideas, get in touch with your school friends, manage your calendar, share it with family and friends, buy gifts, watch steaming videos, share pictures, well you get the point right.. Google helps us to make the things that are important to us simple. And isn’t that what we all want!

I was introduced to Google in 1999. A friend of mine advised me to give this search engine a try. And after it fetched me my first set of results, search on the net was never the same. It delivered results that really mattered. And over the time it just got better and better. One major thing that I think added to the popularity was the absolute basic interface. No fancy categories, no heavy graphics. And in the era of dial up internet connections that made all the difference.

Over the years, it has grown. Today it’s one of the biggest companies around. It has kept adding services to its arsenal. Gmail, Froogle, Adsense, Youtube. But the principle of KISS still remains at its core which probably is the biggest reason for its unprecedented success.

I still remember the day Gmail was announced with a storage space of 1gb. People, including me thought it was another of Google’s brilliant April Fool’s joke. But when it became official, it changed the whole web email domain.

Google too has managed to rally huge public goodwill. It has become a standard by which people judge any service provider today. Google has managed to convey very successfully that it genuinely is concerned and committed to provide its user the best net experience. It has used its many official blogs to keep people updated on all that is happening with the company. I personally think that this is a master stroke in marketing and connecting to its customer base.

I expect Google to grow even further but not unchallenged. Until the next epic idea… here’s three cheers to Google!

Ok, continuing with the human technology series, the next thing application that I want to touch upon is Winamp. I had already mentioned it on the article about MP3. Winamp is the leader in mp3 players. I have been using it since, well since the beginning of the mp3 revolution. At that time it was the most readily available player. It was surprisingly simple to use. I believe that Winamp is one of the few softwares that follows the ‘KISS’ principle. Look at it, it’s UI matches the UI of any traditional music system. The ‘play’, ‘pause’ buttons, the graphical equalizers, the display. I think that’s what made it click. Playing mp3 was no different than playing you normal cd. Also there were added gimmicks like skins, and plugins that made it more personal. I really remember this one plugin that would attach speakers to the player. It was so cool. It also had all those 3D visualizations, which one could just watch while the music played. Winamp also stuck a cord with the internet community. It was easy on the resources. Never crashed. People developed some awesome add-on to it. All-in-all it just clicked like no other player. Every new release was an tracked, and instantly installed. The release of version 2 was a milestone. Today there are zillions of mp3 player. iTunes is probably the most popular. But Winamp still has maintained it’s distinct identity. Over the years it’s kept up with times, but its UI has remained consistent.

I have been using computers since 1997. It’s been 10 years since than. Today I have decided to share with you my views on some of the technologies, gadgets that I think have changed, touched our lives in more ways than we could ever imagine. I hope to do this over a period of time. Let me begin with my experience with them. I will try to be as chronologically correct as possible.
To begin with I will start with mp3. mp3’s is one of those things that if you think about it now, you would wonder how we ever lived without it before 1997. I was given a CD by a friend of mine. He told me that it contained 170 songs and I was like ‘WHAT???’. This was in when I was in college, when buying a CD was a five hundred rupee affair. I remember I hardly had any CD’s then. It would have to be a really amazing album for me to spend that kind of money on it. I normally used to buy cassettes. So imagine having 170 of the latest songs on a CD and being able to listen to it and they sounded no different to the actual CD. The first song that I listened to was I think ‘my heart will go on’ by Celine Dion. I am not sure, it was either this or ‘torn’ by Natalie Imbruglia. It was no easy task to convince my friend to allow me to take the CD for a day so that I could copy the ‘mp3s’ on my machine. And on the CD there was this software called ‘Winamp’. My friend told me that to listen to the songs I had to install this exe. To this day I listen to my mp3s using Winamp. Since that fateful day 10 years back, so much has changed in the way we listen to music and most of it thanks to mp3.
Today have gigabytes of mp3’s is so common. Mp3 have made listening to music so accessible. You can listen to it at work, while traveling, while working out. Most people that I know listen to music from mp3’s. I also want to mention that mp3 have made more music available to people. Today it’s possible to find and listen to the rarest of the rare music through the internet. Tracks from movies, original compositions from every nook and corner of this planet are available. I wonder sometimes if the people behind the mp3 codec ever thought that they were going to revolutionized music when they decided to work on that piece of code. I would like to know how they feel about this today.