Boomtime vignettes: From top and from left to right Boy-wonder Sabeer Bhatia; the man who saw ahead in January 1996, Rediff.com's Ajit Balakrishnan; the teeming crowds at India Internet World 1998; Jupiter's netguru Gene de Rose; we'll-produce-butterflies VCs Raj Kondur and Ashish Dhawan; jobsite entrepreneur Puneet Dalmia; the Indya team in happier days; IIW 98 again; and Yahoo Shammi Kapoor

Do you remember where you were and what you were doing on August 9, 1995? Not vague generalities such as "I think I was in London" or "I must have been at work" but specific locations and happenings? Ten years is a long time, but this writer remembers where he was (at work, in a newspaper's HQ in Chennai) all day and what he did in the evening: chatted briefly with a friend who called to say The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia had finally passed on-fare ye well, Jer-and then listened and re-listened to Birdsong, a GD classic. August 9, 1995, was also the day the Netscape IPO opened, and sold out, but here in India, the following day's newspapers paid just about as much attention to it as they did to Garcia's passing, which wasn't much.

In an article in Wired (print may pay my bills, but it is so limited; had this been a blog, Constant Reader, a link would have taken you straight to the piece) Kevin Kelly, whose new designation at the magazine is Senior Maverick (if you do not know the man go ahead and Google his name; and please excuse the profusion of parentheses; they're the closest I can get to links), writes that "The Netscape IPO wasn't really about dot-commerce." "At its heart was a new cultural force based on mass collaboration, blogs, Wikipedia, open source, peer-to-peer-behold the power of the people."

In many ways, 1995 marked the beginning of the internet age: Yahoo was incorporated in March of the year; Amazon went live in July; Netscape's IPO debuted in August; and in December, AltaVista launched its services with 16 million indexed pages (something that immediately made it the web's largest search engine in those days).

VSNL, then still state-owned, did launch a 14.4 kbps dial-up internet access service that year, and early users-in Mumbai, for some reason, it was actor Shammi Kapoor, who was the only one, between Jonathan Swift and Jerry Yang and David Filo, to be associated with the term Yahoo! (he had yelled it out, repeatedly, in a motion picture he starred in back in the 1960s or 1970s and it had caught on)-spoke at free seminars to spread the message about the wondrous www, but the internet age did not really dawn in India till December 1997.

That month, a Bangalore-boy named Sabeer Bhatia, who had made the Valley his home, sold his free e-mail service Hotmail to Microsoft for $400 million (Rs 1,760 crore). Bhatia and this writer were batch mates for two years at one of India's best-known engineering schools before the former transferred out, but hey, 10 years on, I get to write about the internet age and he gets to keep the remnants of $400 million, so I guess life is fair.

If 1998's India Internet World, a jamboree featuring venture capitalists, dotcom entrepreneurs, and awe-struck bystanders who desperately wanted to be part of it all wasn't the actual point of inflection, then it was a pretty good mirror of what was happening. Bhatia was there, as were several other worthies, including Gene de Rose, a striking looking man with a goatee and a shaven pate, who had wanted to be a writer, actually tended bar to keep body and soul together, and ended up heading one of the world's most respected internet research firms (Jupiter).

The next three years were like an extended Jay-Gatsby-style party (resort to Google and you'll find out how Scott Fitzgerald was able to write so feelingly about boom and bust).

In Delhi, Ashish Dhawan and Raj Kondur, both young veterans from us investment banks, founded a venture capital firm Chrysalis and worked out of the city's Oberoi Hotel; the two of them and entrepreneurs with dollar-dreams in their eyes and portable computers in their hands became fixtures at the hotel's coffee shop.

In Bangalore, spurned by Yahoo-wannabe Rediff (he wanted to buy it out), Raj Koneru launched Indiainfo, another Yahoo-wannabe.

And in Bombay, Rajesh Jain was building on a family of content-rich sites that he would eventually sell to Sify in November 1999 for a staggering Rs 500 crore. The magic bus was rolling and everyone wanted to be on it.

Then, reality, in the form of low pc penetration, even lower internet penetration, and the fact that being a dotcom didn't excuse an enterprise from having a sound, revenue-based business plan, struck back. Several thousand Indian dotcoms died in 2001 and 2002.

By then, the net had changed everything. Today, the benefits of the internet are so widespread that they are often taken for granted. Most Indian companies boast digital supply chains that enhance efficiency and reduce costs. The telecom boom has been engendered, in part, by networks that are IP (internet protocol) enabled. And the resurgence of interest in India as a destination for venture capital and private equity funds can be traced back to the glory years of the dotcom boom.

Circa August 2005, India has around 40 million internet users , largely resident in urban areas. The personal computer isn't really personal in India with most people being able to access one only in cyber cafes or at work. And, at last count, the country had less than half a million broadband connections (up from less than a 10th of a million six months back; and broadband itself is what consultants would like to term a game-changer as far as the penetration and the use of the internet in India goes).

If there's reason for hope, it is that India is expected to have 200 million mobile telephony subscribers by 2008, if not 2007. If there's reason for hope, it is that internet-on-cable looks set to become a widely-available and cost-effective alternative to every other form of internet access. And if there's reason for hope, it is that things happen in India shortly after they do in China, and the successful us-listing of Chinese search firm Baidu and the acquisition of the country's e-marketplace Alibaba.com by Yahoo presage a better future for the net in India.

Do you remember what you were doing on August 9, 2005? Well, this writer was listening to a podcast of a August 10, 1995, memorial service to Garcia, loaded on to his iPod by a colleague, a podcast fiend, who seems to have enough time on his hands for such things. Must google to find out what that French saying is about how the more things change...