Well! This might come as a surprise to many of you.
Know what ! The Heavens are on the net. This happened on Thursday.
I was browsing around those sites of philosophy and religion, when I came
across this innocuous looking button that simply said "Click here for the
heavens". That took me straight to that exotic URL: http//www.heaven.com/
That was the home page of..... (my goodness)...Indra.
A lovely website, and surely professionally done. It gave a clear introduction
of what the site was about. It had not too many slow loading graphics and
it had hotlinks to many other related sites like agni.org, vayu.com, ...takshak.com..
and so on. I coolly clicked on the picture of Urvashi and reached the page
of Urvashi. This particular site was recording over a million hits per
day. No wonder! It had some excellent graphics and lots of video files.
I was getting them just fine, no jerky frames. They were using some great
modems, all #Td^@ and above. I quickly downloaded some of the graphics
(old habits.. hee hee). The service provider in heaven was using some huge
RISC thing I had not heard about. The sysop was nice. He was somebody who
was logging as Narada. I had a lovely chat with him. He was telling me
that there has been large scale automation and networking in the heavens.
Everybody is online. But they are still getting used to it. The Gods were
generally happy with the Windows 95 (because of its GUI based frontend.)
But there has been lots of doubts too. One FAQ BBS site that this sysop
maintains is being flooded with questions like..."Where do I click to paste
the contents of the clipboard" and things like that. Narada was also telling
me that all that has been made possible because of the terrabyte channel
that has come up between Heaven and Earth and its all on STARCOM. And the
Universe wide drop in the prices of hardware. Even Hell was going to come
up on the net very soon. They have been facing some problems. Some buggy
software at their end of course.
The sysop was telling me that the price of Pentiums had fallen enough
to fit the average Gods pocket and they were all going in for it. Little
children of the Gods were giving up classical sports like Chariot Racing
and Archery to play silly Windows games like Minesweeper and Solitaire
at their homes. I could see office automation everywhere. Yamaraj has had
to go in for the largest ever Database Management. Its on Oracle of course
! All our lives and deaths have been neatly maintained. And there is some
heavy processing going on, for there are constant updation. Incidentally
Seymour Cray has recently been hired* to develop an yet another powerful
supercomputer for their processing work. I was planning to access this
site http//www.yamraj.gov/ to make some amends to my personal file, if
I could. But I faced a massive firewall in the way. Promptly I pasted this
info at a hackers BBS at Germany. As is usual two German teenagers are
on the job.
There was one interesting Website I came along the way. It was called
the Wishing Page. You just had to post a wish there and it would get processed
in due time. I left one "Wish to see Time Travel work during my lifetime."
There were lots of massive databases in the heavens from where one could
collect good info. And there were some powerful SQL based search engines.
For example there was this database on valuable books. The database even
maintains the Ancient Greek literature which was lost to humanity in the
Great fire of Rome in blah blah BC. You know I am a li'l poor with my Greek
so I didn't try my hand on this one. But its all there.
Just like us mortals, I found the Gods were just crazy about shareware,
filling up their hard disk with whatever they got hold of. They were even
inquiring with me for pirated CD's. Buy your own registered software. I
told them....Yeah!
After all the browsing was over, I found my system behaving in an erratic
manner. A directory by the name of PingPong had come up and was growing
....fast. I tried to do a virus check. My latest antivirus just died after
reading the boot sector. I got the idea. This was a worm from the heavens.
I quickly yanked off my modem and made up my mind to format my hard disk.
I would be losing all the snazzy graphics of Urvashi of course! So I cant
show you. The same sites are currently generating a 404 error. You probably
will never believe me. But yes, if the wish came through, you'd know. But
probably will never tell me.
* On 22 Sept 96, Seymour Cray, the creator of supercomputer was travelling in a jeep in Colarado, US when he was hit by a Pontiac. And then again hit by a Chevrolet. He died of head injuries on 05 Oct 96 of head injuries.
To the Western surfer:
The unfamiliar proper names are all Gods and characters from the Indian
Mythology.