Marcus’ Blog

Twelve years ago, I did my graduation project with a university in Hong Kong. A few of my student friends from Holland were doing a traineeship in Auckland, New Zealand, while others were back in Amsterdam.

This was still the time of expensive international calling rates, but still we were able to communicate daily - for free. This was all thanks to “email” which was then in it’s early days. We would all log into an obscure mainframe type system (VAX), used “VI editor” to type and edit email, and then hoped it would end up to the other side of the world. It was the first experience with near immediate online messaging over the Internet, and everything wasn’t as user friendly as it currently is. I remember frequently loosing whole draft emails because I used the wrong escape character code and mistakenly deleted emails.
But we were happy with it. Every day we exchanged our “academic progress reports” as well as a few lines on what we were up to in weekends

Now it’s a mere 12 years later (dang I’m getting old), and guess what, I can show off my brand new son to my parents back in Holland in full colour, full motion, and with sound. All over the Internet, and all virtually for free.

Thanks to Skype 2.0 which made an excellent update to their VoIP voice communications software and now supports video. I haven’t seen a software that’s this easy to use and yet offers a very acceptable quality image and sound.

~M