The History of Kgp's LAN (Part 2/2)

(Continued from The History of Kgp's LAN (Part 1/2) )

...this kaand brought us and our LAN to national publicity for the first time ever.

The RaviRaj kaand [More popularly referred to as the DPS MMS case outside Kgp]. Kgp became notoriously famous overnight as a giant Hub of unlimited porn. It was an extremely embarrassing situation for every Kgpian. Most of them were at their homes when this news broke out. Everyone was asked by some parent or a nosy aunt or a distant friend, "Raviraj tera dost tha kya ??"

After this huge turmoil, when KGPians returned to college in January, explicit notices were put up everywhere and for a couple of days, DC++ was off too. Even uttering the word 'porn' was serious sacrilege. There was a rumor that someone somewhere is monitoring your computer. It was during this period that vast amounts of 'resources' were destroyed and people had turned into puritans, temporarily of course.

Then after a few days, no one knows how or from where, a term was coined, a term that would become as popular in the KGP lingo as ‘Bhaat’, 'peace' or even 'makhana'. This was the term 'Bhajan'. Slowly with time, people started sharing more bhajans on DC and soon life was happy as ever for the KGPian. This was the time when SERVER™, mkd, Nukem and MrMast ruled the Kingdom of LAN.

Later in this semester came along another craze. Google started Gmail. Gmail was then on a purely invitational basis and it was a privilege to have a Gmail account. It was the first e-mail service to offer 1GB of storage (to store all the junk fwds in the world).


The Google Age:
(2005-2006)

As soon as people returned from the summers they were introduced to Gtalk which eventually changed the way KGPians chatted with each other. Gtalk was small, fast and people could use it as a phone too. Yahoo messenger was becoming a pain with every passing day. I remember I read a status message on a friend's YM, "Yahoo is History.. My Gtalk ID is ***"

Soon Gtalk became the norm. People started blogging quite often. All the hidden poets and journalists started off with a simple blog.

Soon Orkut and Blogger were integrated with the gmail account and the Kgpian had one password for all.

Nukem, Frosty, Nefilim, nullchar and ReligiousMonk ruled the Kingdom..


The New Age:
(2006-07)

KGP's LAN had evolved at a tremendous pace and had reached saturation. Soon the LAN became bigger and better. DC++ had taught people to share more, so much so, that people had bought more hard disks to share stuff on LAN. There was a race to share more stuff on LAN. For the first time the total size shared stuff on DC++ had became more than 1 TB in Spring 2005.Today it has around 15-20 TB of stuff at any point of time.

Yahoo had INFACT become History.

-- Funda by Anish Thanatil on his blog. I take the baton from here.

The Current Age
(2007 - Present day)

The evolution has continued to the present day, and faster than ever. Very soon, people started bringing over external hard disks to increase their share size, which resulted in some of them sharing over 1 TB individually (Yo garrett !!) A minimum sharesize of 8 GB was fixed, and DC++ saw over 50 TB being shared for the first time in Spring 2008, during the inaugral IPL session. The min.sharesize went from 8 GB to 16 GB, to 24 GB as of now. The average total share is around 60-70 TB nowadays, and over 97 TB has been touched, during the last India/NZ T-20 series. DC++ pundits expect to cross the magic figure of 100 TB during the oncoming IPL season.
 ]-[ELLFRAGGER, Garrett, ak_rulz and THE_DON are emperors of the LAN. DC++ also got its first ever female "VIP" recently.

LAN has started showing new colours, with useful stuff like eBooks, video lectures, good documentaries, funda files etc. So now we have LAN for the froost, LAN for the maggu, LAN for the nerd, LAN for the geek, LAN for the dude, and for pretty much everyone there is... If it exists, it's there on DC++.

Streaming TV from the common room is quite popular nowadays, with everyone enjoying the broadcast in their rooms. Even during key cricket matches, the common rooms can be seen empty except for the occasional fachcha waiting for his lappy to arrive. The number of TV series available and watched has exploded as well, which now include, besides Friends; How I Met Your Mother, Roadies, Prison break, The Big Bang Theory, Boston Legal, Coupling, Heroes, 24, Two-and-half Men, House, 8-Simple-Ways... etc. to name a few. Animés, and other cartoon series (I have surely managed to offend some people by comparing Animes to cartoons) are largely popular as well, with Naruto and Dragonball Z being the favorites, though I wonder why. A HUGE number of movies, from Mackenna's Gold to Mithun's Gunda, are available and watched with fervour.

A very recent development would be the new campus "radio", kNUTS, started by a handful of enthusiasts, which is streamed using an internal proxy, and slowly gaining listnership.

CS still remains the most popular timepass (Again, some people may be offended by me calling it a timepass), while AOE, NFS and FIFA are popular as well. Gaming freaks have come up with their own battle grounds by forming Cyber Leagues to find out the most HuHaa player of all.

Blackberries, iPhones, iPods have begun showing up (and disappearing as well)!!

Orkut looks ready to give way to facebook as the ultimate social networking website. Yahoo is completely out of the picture now, with most fests and societies switching over to Google Groups. Blogging is the rage, with more and more Kgpians joining the Blogosphere every day. Even fests and societies are realizing the importance of Blogs and consequently, of Bloggers, with some of them outsourcing the Chronicler's job to makeshift "Official" bloggers. Some students even maintain 2 or more blogs, and some go in for niche subjects like litt, tech, quizzing, art etc. Microblogging is also catching up, though most people wouldn't know what I'm talking about unless I actually mention twitter.

And how can I close on DC++ without mentioning the part everyone loves to hate, the MainChat. It is used as a platform to express opinions and vent frustaapa, while maintaining anonimity under nicks like toofan and jaanam_samjha_karo. I would have loved mentioning some of the topics discussed, but this is a family blog afterall... :)

The response to my previous entry has been overwhelming, and I've been flooded with "eagerly awaiting the next post..." messages, which goes on to show the kind-of "sento" people have for their beloved LAN. Recent rumours about the insti "taking control" of the LAN have especially heightened the sentiment. One only needs to read the History of Kgp's LAN once, all that it has went through in so few years, yet only growing stronger, to realize that it has become something more than just a network, something bigger than all of us, cause afterall, HiT Hi FiT Hai!! For us, it is as much of a "symbol" of the insti, as the insti tower or its Halls, the difference being that these remain static don't grow with time. We shall come and go, and LAN will continue to evolve and influence the lives of whole generations of Kgpians.

Yo Kgp... Yo LAN!!!

If you liked the posts, please don't forget to leave a comment. Kgpians could, as well, discuss the post on Mainchat... :)

Peace...