By Harjap Singh Aujla
I am talking about the early 1980s, when work was going on for what is now called World Wide Web and its multitude of off-shoots. In 1980, a very compassionate ground nut growing farmer Jimmy Carter was the President of the United States of America.
He was a gentleman to the core. But an unreasonable firebrand religious heavy weight Ayatollah Rooh Ullah Khomeini had, after overthrowing the secular Shah of Iran, assumed the de-facto sole leadership of Iran. In an unprecedented action in the history of nations, the Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the taking over of hostages of entire staff of the Embassy of the United States in Teheran.
Jimmy Carter wanted a negotiated solution to resolve the hostage problem. He could take a strong military action to rescue all the hostages, but he wanted to avoid a bloodbath with a lot of co-lateral damage, which was inevitable in ruthless actions. His wavering resolve became his undoing and he was defeated by a flamboyant actor turned politician Ronald Reagan, a nominee of the extreme right winger Republican Party in the election held in November of 1980.
Otherwise 1980 was an uneventful year. In the month of February the colorful Winter Olympics were held in the frigid upstate New York in America. In addition to other surprise successes, the Americans annexed the coveted Ice Hockey Gold Medal, defeating the much fancied team of the Soviet Union. The Americans were in a celebratory mode from coast to coast.
The 1980 Summer Olympiad was hosted by the Soviet Union in Moscow. A highly conceited America did not accord due respect that the biggest sports carnival in the world deserved. Even the coverage of field hockey matches was made a listless affair within America. I had to take three hours off from my work to try to watch the final match between India and Spain on television or to hear it on radio.
Whereas the most high-tech American television disappointed me thoroughly, the BBC World Service on radio gave the scores and the final result was 3 goals by India versus 2 goals by Spain. India won the men’s field hockey gold medal for the record eighth time. This is an unbeaten Olympic record. For the rest of the day, I was most upbeat in the office too. The evening was the time to celebrate and we celebrated it by cutting a cake.
I found out that America is a self centred nation, one thing that I missed in America was the fresh daily news from India. There were some English language newspapers published from New York, Chicago and the Western coastal cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, which were collecting news everyday from India and publishing on the weekends. I was better informed than the India centric newspapers.
On my powerful digital shortwave radio, I could listen to the General Oversees Service of All India Radio directed towards the United Kingdom, which was not giving the domestic news in entirety, but I could get a majority of the important news.
On January 20th of 1981, Ronald Reagan took the oath of the presidency of the most powerful nation in the world. From day one he intensified the arms race with the Soviet Union and took first steps to unite the world through a World Wide Web and the internet services. The armed forces of the United States were the first to get experimental use of the World Wide Web.
In the beginning, during most of the 1980s, we had very rudimentary computers in the offices to do basically the typing of letters and to maintain our internal departmental data-base. As the research spearheaded by San Francisco based firms advanced, our computers were replaced by better and better ones. Slowly and steadily, we were entering the phase of using the Google Search Engine and the electronic mail messaging. Suddenly we discovered that the world is one.
The Soviet Union had a smaller economy and during the race for armed supremacy, it could not keep pace with a much bigger fiscal reservoir of America. Financially exhausted by the unsustainable arms race with America, all of a sudden, the Soviet Union started collapsing. The American economy was stressed too, but taking serious falls and bumps, it could keep rolling along. Soon facebook and youtube also arrived on the scene.
As the time passed, Whats-app arrived too and the whole world was united. Most of the servers and storage of data was in the United States. Now some of the countries like India and China want to control the use of internet storage and access to the stored material. America is resisting citing reasons of privacy.
harjapaujla@gmail.com