My First encounter with Internet

When I was in engineering, most of my classmates were localites and especially girls were all from the same place. But most of the girls used to be in their own groups and always used to talk loudly during break. I had some good friends in my class. One fine day, when I was still in 1st sem, they were all talking about chatting and internet. I had some idea about internet, but I had never used it before. So I was listening with so much of interest about this wonder called internet. All that they were talking was about chatting. One of my classmates was telling about how she lied to a guy when he asked about her. The way she was explaining each and every line of her chat showed that she thoroughly had fun. That whole group was laughing loud.
Another day, one of my friend said that her brother (our senior in the same college) had opened an email account for her. I had heard these terms, but absolutely had no clue about using an email account. Since she was a bit close to me, I asked her, how is she going to use it? She said “ I don’t know, my brother said he had been to the internet center and opened an account for me. He said he will teach me sometime later”.

At that time there were hardly 2 or 3 browsing centers in the entire city and the price per hour was around 90-100 rupees. I wanted someone who can help me while browsing because I was not ready to waste so much money just to explore.
One day my one more good friend came to me and suggested that we will go for browsing (even this term was new: P). We decided that we will both share a single computer so that our budget won’t cross our limits. I was excited to see what this wonder is going to be.

So we both went to the browsing center which was near our college and asked for a computer for browsing. We asked that net center person for some help since we were very new. The first thing that person opened for us was MIRC. It took almost an hour for us to get adjusted to what was going on on the computer screen. Met a film actress from Philippines(that’s what she told us :P). In the beginning we asked her what she was doing. She seemed to be very annoyed and hurt, she said “ you don’t know me! I am an actress here”. Probably she might have thought she is world famous (Or was she just fooling us..) On that day in the browsing center we both did only chatting and the bill was around 200 rupees.

Then another day, we wanted to open an email account. We were walking towards the same browsing center. Suddenly I told my friend that it will be convenient for me if we go to a browsing center near my hostel. She asked me why. Then I said, “If I create the account near my hostel, it will be easy for me to go to that place whenever I want. Otherwise I have to come to this place each time”. My friend luckily didn’t laugh at me. She explained me what her brother (who was already a software engineer then) had explained her. That was also a big wonder for me when I got to know that we can open our account from any center and access it from somewhere else.

Everything has changed over this period of time (almost 8-9 years). Now even my cousin who is in 2nd class knows most of the things about computer and Internet browsing. Whenever I see him talking/asking about these things, I remember my first encounter and laugh alone.