Technically Speaking, We Witnessed it All: Four Years of Technology Changed the Way ’02 Lived

The technology bubble was still inflating when the Class of 2002 entered Harvard in September 1998.

Like a giant tidal wave refusing to crest, technology stocks soared. Investors poured money into the market without thinking twice, and the entire economy surged forward. Every idea was a new source of money, and stories of Harvard grads making millions trickled down to those of us just starting our college careers.

Like no other class, ours was subject to the dreams of the technology era and the subsequent slap in the face that reality dealt when that bubble finally burst. We were both the beneficiaries and the victims of the technology economy at the turn of the millennium. And despite the condition of our job searches this year, we’ve lived perhaps the most connected and technology-centric lives in the history of Harvard, and it’s been largely to our benefit.

There are a few areas of our daily routine that have been profoundly and permanently changed in four years. We communicate with one another differently and more often. We compute differently and have different expectations of our computers than we used to. We used to love being wired—now we strive to be wireless.

As first-years, we began trading AOL Instant Messenger screen names. A few at first. Not everyone knew what AIM was, but the instant messaging playing field was being readied for what later culminated in a huge battle between the world’s largest software giants—Microsoft and AOL Time-Warner. At college, AOL won that battle. And AIM changed the way we deal with one another.

As seniors, we’re all familiar with the colon and the parenthesis. If they face left, we’re happy :-). If they face right, we’re sad :-(. The real diehards even know the asterisk kiss :-* and the cool shades of the number eight 8-).

The list goes on, and so does the obsession. According to AOL, high school and college students make up the majority of AIM users, and 1.25 billion instant messages are sent each day through AOL. Graduation farewell e-mails provide far more than just mailing addresses. Along with the expected @post e-mail addresses, we’re also trading screen names. E-mail presents the option of communication, but instant messaging encourages it. If for no other reason than this, we’re bound to be the most in-touch Harvard alumni yet.

But AIM is just one piece in the puzzle that redefined our communication habits. Our first year at Harvard saw many people purchase cell phones, too. When we arrived, not having a cell phone wasn’t out of the ordinary. Today, a student without a cell phone is an island without a bridge. (And no man is an island.)

Even cell phones have come a long way over four years. Especially today, when wireless text messages are delivered directly to your telephone, the media of communication are converging. Our social lives were the beneficiaries. We didn’t use them to study or get problem sets finished on time. We used them to get together with friends. We used them to connect. Yes, we even used them to hook up. It’s hard to believe the concept of a midnight booty call hardly existed four years ago.

With the music industry asleep at the wheel, Shawn Fanning, a first-year at Northeastern, drew up a bit of technology history of his own. While plodding through his first-year classes, the young Cape Cod native was programming a little ditty called Napster, an application that promised to make MP3 distribution easy and fast. Turns out he was way ahead of more than just the rich executives at Warner and BMG. While students eagerly traded the latest Britney songs, Harvard’s Internet connection started feeling the weight of a whole new breed of traffic. Students weren’t just sending messages and peeking at websites any more.

We were downloading entire albums and then sending them to 10 other people. Twice an hour. With every computer. In almost every room. The effects were less than pleasing to the people at Harvard’s Network Operations Center, and they eventually clamped down on our bandwidth. The restrictions remain in place today.

Meanwhile, silly ideas spawned brilliant web-based businesses. Perhaps the single most life-changing example was Kozmo.com, the company that sold you cigarettes, Sour Patch Kids, and Swanson frozen dinners at retail-competitive prices while still managing to have them delivered to your door within an hour. Hundreds of Harvard students drove the Boston operation by incessantly ordering $3 of candy every evening before Seinfeld reruns came on.

The dream that was Kozmo continued for years. They opened their service in Boston our first year, and by sophomore and junior years, we’d caught on. Little orange men on orange bicycles appeared at entrances to Houses like clockwork.

Students were more than consumers. They were businesspeople. A few students in the senior class got their hands on piles of free merchandise through CyberRebate.com.

The premise was simple. Buy things at exorbitant prices, wait 10 weeks and get all your money back. The company would use the money you’d paid for the merchandise to turn an investment profit before returning the capital to you. The customer kept the merchandise. $250 DVDs, $10,000 LCD monitors, and other insanely priced items came to Harvard’s mail centers, and for the most part, things worked well. Until things stopped working.

“They were very good about paying their rebates all the way through until when they went under,” said Michael T. Sha ’02 over crystal-clear digital cell phone connection. Sha ended up losing some cash in the end, when the company quit sending the checks, but managed to recoup his losses by reselling some of the free merchandise he had acquired. “I probably didn’t lose much,” he says.

CyberRebate wasn’t the only company hurting. As the Internet bubble started showing its first signs of collapse so did Kozmo’s business plan. The company instituted a minimum order of $10 (how many Sour Patch Kids is that again?) and before gasping its last breath, finally started charging for delivery. Harvard kids returned to 7-Eleven in droves, and in April 2001, Kozmo made its final delivery way, way behind schedule: 1,100 pink slips.

And as Napster entered the courtroom, things started slowing down there, too. Getting your hands on the latest MP3s got harder. The company instituted a loose filtering system which users managed to circumvent. Eventually Napster came up with something foolproof, and the fun was over.

Then came the post-bubble follow-ups, like Kazaa and Morpheus, two services still in use today. The Class of 2002 witnessed the golden era of free music swapping—unlimited bandwidth, unenforced laws and active participation—a combination almost surely never to be seen again.

All this chatting, buying and downloading ushered in a new era of gadgetry. Yes, we had personal computers, but we thought they were on the way out. Odds are, as a first-year, you didn’t know anyone with a digital camera. Today, if you don’t own one yourself, a close friend probably does. You probably know someone with an iPod MP3 player. You may even know someone with a digital video camera or a Palm device that doubles as a cell phone. And as we continue to demand more from our gadgetry, our computers continue to be the centers of the digital universe. As first-years, computers were our word processors and e-mail machines. Today, they are the means by which we run our lives. In 1998, some were heralding the death of the PC. Today, we’re embracing personal computers in a new way, and our college years were the years that shaped that change.

How we interacted with technology over our four years here will largely define how we interact with it for the next 20. Unlike classes who graduated a decade ago, ours is accustomed to relying on the Internet for just about everything, and gadgets will continue to proliferate. The personal computer lives on, and the ways in which we communicate will continue to evolve. The title of “most connected class” may not be ours for ever, but for the next 365 days, it belongs to the class of 2002.