The first website I ever visited

25 years ago in a galaxy far far away...

The year was 1999. I don’t remember much but this was the year when I went online for the first time. It happened in a weird roundabout way.

As a teenager back then, my world had opened up a little more. The reason was that Ranchi, where I grew up finally started to get the Times of India. Being a small-ish city in Eastern India, not yet the capital of the state of Jharkhand, there were few newspapers published in town. And none of them in English. So English newspapers reached us via overnight train from Calcutta or sometimes by the midday daily flight from Delhi. So, people who wanted to read English newspapers had the unique experience of reading it by the time they came back from work! Anyway, TOI used to cover all new technologies in the west very enthusiastically, so much so that a lot of it sounded like science fiction to us here in India. The internet got a lot of breathless coverage, and everybody wanted to get on it but dial-up internet and Cyber Cafes was still a couple of years away. As a teenager, I had no option but to wait. But we did have cable TV, and we also had membership to the local chapter of the British Library. That is where I came across this April 26th version of TIME magazine.

Star Wars as a movie franchise was unknown to me. None of the grown-ups I knew had watched what is now known as the original trilogy. For some reason, the original trilogy released in the late 70’s and early 80’s was never very popular in India. Anyway, I got hooked. The mythology, the creatures and the planets were all very exciting to me and I read the magazine cover to cover at least three times. What seemed mind-blowing to me was the concept of a prequel, to go back in time and have an entire movie on past events - not as a flashback. It just seemed like the coolest storytelling approach. The Phantom Menace was to be released in the summer, but I was certain that it would be almost impossible to watch it. English movies just couldn’t find a big enough audience in small town India for distributors to take a chance. And even if they did release, it would be after the movie’s bankability had been thoroughly tested in the metros and that too in the dubbed Hindi version.

So, the only way to find out more was to visit starwars.com Though internet access was hard, I was still optimistic. I traveled to Bangalore for the summer holidays, and I figured I could somehow log on to the internet there. But when I asked around, nobody had internet at home. I had almost given up hope but finally somebody told me that the only place to have internet access are offices especially if it was a software company. This was the heyday of the Y2k scare, so all kinds of hole in the wall companies were operating out of whatever rented space they could get with a broadband internet connection. My Chikappa (dad’s brother), who used to live in Singapore was visiting and was planning to visit a friend of his who had his own software company (I am not sure of whether it was really his company, or he was an employee). I pleaded to accompany him for the visit, and he agreed.

This was a Sunday, and we went to someplace near Sheshadripuram circle. The office felt normal to me except for one detail - there were cubicles in the office which were at least 6 feet in height. This was different from what I was used to seeing in my dad’s office which had large glass topped wooden tables with files and papers and drawers on one side. Feels strange to remember these in the era of open offices and moveable standing desks. After some chit-chat with my uncle which felt like a long time, his friend pointed me to a desktop computer which was already on. I opened Netscape on that and typed in Starwars.com. I waited and waited a little more. Even with broadband the page loaded excruciatingly slowly. Screenshot below (from a YT video tracking the evolution of the website)

The images in the image panel became visible one by one and some of them didn’t load at all. Also, the middle of the front page talked more about the vision of George Lucas rather than the movie which I found unnecessary. The other thing which seems quite weird now is that you needed to download a Quick Time Player to watch the trailer. Once the still images and the text fully loaded (which probably took at least ten minutes), I committed the sin of trying to download QuickTime. The screen froze and I was greeted with the window most familiar to 90’s kids:

I don’t remember the exact estimated time to download but it was some crazy number of days. As I watched the single sheets of paper fly between the earth and the folder, internet as a technology seemed over-hyped. It was taking a long time, and I was debating whether to press cancel or not. Eventually, I didn’t have to make that decision as a most Indian of interventions prevented me from going further - the power cut! The computer lost power and by the time the diesel generator was turned on (this was a time before inverters) it was too late. And so ended my first attempt at accessing the internet.

Which was the first website you visited?

PS: Of course, this was not the end of the story as far as my fascination with Star Wars. I couldn’t, as expected watch the movie in a cinema theater and didn’t even notice when Episodes II and III came out. I lost all interest for a decade and half until some point in the 2010s when Hotstar got all the 6 +3 Starwars movies (Original Trilogy, Prequel Trilogy and the later Sequel trilogy) on its platform via its partnership with Disney (by this time Lucasfilm had been sold to Disney). In hindsight it was good that I didn’t get to watch Episode I - perhaps the weakest of the first six movies.

PPS: The second website which I accessed was Yahoomail and my first ever email id was: metalheadrajat@yahoo.co.in (That’s a story for another time)