Such money raised its own level of expectations which could just not be met. The result was what we all know.

In India politicians declared their intentions to set up IT parks; bureaucrats blustered about the advantages that their states would offer to the prospective clients; the IT Act was passed, zila parishads were gifted Pentiums for children, even the SGPC allocated Rs 60 lakh for Internet services. There was much momentum about information technology all over.

A survey by the Ministry of Information Technology showed in March that the southern states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and the UT of Pondicherry accounted for 43.47 per cent of India’s exports of computer software and services and were valued at $ 1,745.10 million, whereas the northern contribution from Delhi, Uttar Pradesh Haryana, Rajasthan, Punjab and Madhya Pradesh was $1,438.34 million in 1999-2000. No prizes in guessing which states did rather poorly.

India lost its main IT voice in the death of Devang Mehta, the NASCOM chief in May. It was yet another blow to IT in the nation.

Of course the scenario took a turn for the worse following recession in the US market which was India’s biggest client, both for software and jobs for trained professionals. The result? A large layoff of people who held what seemed like dream jobs, and a cut in orders from the US market. We are all too familiar with horror stories of IT dreams turned sour. Many of the H1-B technical workers had to return home. There were often charges that the foreign workers were being laid off disproportionately, more so after the September 11 attacks.

Thus Indian IT specialists faced being laid off from dream jobs, and finding a shrinking market in India, since there was now less work in a recession-hit economy. This was a time to "leave the Silicon Valley and scale the Alps," where Germany had, according to one report, four lakh vacancies, France one lakh, Austria 30,000 and Norway half that. The European Union beckoned, though here different skills were needed, including language proficiency beyond the universal one of bits and bytes.

At a corporate level, while many companies were hurt, especially those which had put all their eggs in one basket, big, well-managed companies like Wipro and Infosys posted profits even as most of the international tech-giants were posting losses.

In India, too, significant gains were made at the government level in bringing about the Information Technology Act and legalising the Voice over Internet Protocol, which would allow telephone calls over the Net from April, 2002. This has made what has been till now a hidden, under the table, activity into a potential legal money spinner.

The government took various e-governance initiatives, which have had various degrees of impact on the lives of the common man. In some places, the programmes directly affected the common man, though sometimes the gains were not immediately apparent. At the same time, there is no doubting that a vast majority of our population is convinced that the future lies in computing and they want their children to adopt this technology. Witness the rise in computer coaching intuitions, though there has been a long-standing complaint about the quality of such institutions and that they produce "computer mechanics," rather than true IT professionals with the depth and knowledge to adapt. As a result, went skill-sets different from those they were originally hired for.

The IT slump has resulted in a shakedown in such teaching centres also. Many have closed down, more due to lack of adequate planning and infrastructure than other reasons such as declining demand. However, NIIT has been posting positive results, showing that there is still need for quality IT educational intuitions.

A major shift after the September 11 attacks is in outsourcing of computer-related work to other areas. As a result of this, lower paying jobs are being shifted to this country. Medical transcription and call centres have been gainers in this, though they suffer from overcapacity because of the "gold rush" syndrome.

Computer viruses became a bane of users worldwide. Protecting computers from such attacks became a major security concern as millions of users in Indian and abroad struggled to deal with malicious codes such as Anna, Love Bug, Sircam and Nimda.

The spurt in security software has brought about work for many a programmer and right now there is an ever-increasing demand for such professionals. Similarly those good at network security have found themselves being courted as much today as they were during the "good times."

Similarly, once the wild expectations regarding e-commerce faded, it has emerged as a solid corollary of regular business, rather than a stand alone wonder. Online banking is a growing reality in India and most people are quite comfortable with that practical manifestation of advances in IT—the automatic teller machine—ATM.

The notion that paper books would be passé is itself now outdated, as publishers who launched multi-million dollar initiatives on e-books eventually either went under or consolidated their operations with regular book publishing ventures. This was an idea that came before its time and there were too many conflicting standards and devices.

E-books will have a market, though it is not as big as it was thought it would be and various standards and protocols have to be defined to allow cross-platform compatibility.

Those dealing with biometrics, the use of automated systems to recognise physical characteristics of human beings, have received much more interest and work since the September 11 attacks. In fact, Panasonic and Siemens showcased biometric gadgets at Comdex. Panasonics, Authencicam, which uses iris-recognition software to confirm access for online transactions such as banking, has an early start in this.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. If this common American saying needed any vindication from the online world, it came much more forcefully this year since various companies that sought to provide free or nearly free services just went belly up. Excite.com failed to keep its financial backers excited and went deep into the red, as did the giant Internet host Exodus which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the USA.

Similarly many free e-mail services started charging in various ways, by providing alluring add-ons, which are priced. Hosting for sites, especially big sites, became more expensive as hosting service providers charged more for security and reliability.

At the same time, in India, Net access became cheaper with many more players, though it did not result in significant improvement in quality.

The Internet was used as an effective disseminator of information by Tehelka.com, the Website that shook up the Indian establishment by exposing a corruption scandal in defence deals that eventually resulted in Defence Minster George Fernandes’s resignation. Fernandes has since then been re-inducted as the Defence Minister even as an official enquiry is under way to determine the veracity of the allegations of corruption made by the Tehelka expose.

The media has found it necessary to keep its online presence, even as hopes of making mega-bucks were quietly given up as a more realistic picture emerged. The Net is where media will be, and it will have to find new ways of making money.

In fact, whether it is the media or anything else, people have found that by just putting something on the Net, you do not make money; you need a solid business plan, just as you would in any regular brick and mortar place. Bricks and clicks is the new mantra.

Microsoft had to contend with bricks of different sorts. The software giant faces a protracted battle with the US Justice Department which accused it of misusing its monopoly, and despite hopes of an early settlement just a few weeks ago, all does not seem well with the Redmond-based company.

This, however, did not prevent Microsoft from launching its Windows XP operating system, which sort of competes with the Apple OS X (Windows has a much more market share, though Apple X has been praised for its elegance).

The Indianisation of Microsoft, which employs a huge number of Indian software professionals, received a further flip with the launch of Office XP and Windows XP in various Indian languages.

A corollary of new operating systems is improved hardware which saw plenty of action, whether in Pentium 4 variety of chips, or other advances in storage and RAM cards.

On the music scene, while MP3 gained more and more acceptance, popular MP3 site Napster, which allowed you to download such music over the Net, was embroiled in legal troubles over copyright violation issues, which cost it dear.

Even as we look at the year that was, let’s go over some of the new technologies that are bound to make IT exciting during the next few years:

Biometrics will become even more focused as security needs of the world rise, especially following the wide-spread paranoia after the September 11 attacks.

A shift towards multipurpose portable IT devices, such as Ericsson Chatpen that "wirelessly transmits and stores handwritten text and graphics from electronic paper, which mimics the weight and flexibility of real paper but is capable of displaying text and graphics like a computer monitor."

Similarly, mobile phones will morph into personal digital assistants (PDAs) and will be miniature computers on the move. While WAP could not deliver up to expectations, SMS became de rigour with the smart set and with the coming of new standards of mobile telephony, better connectivity can be expected, which will result in mobile Net experience. The stress will not be on gizmos for their own sake but for what they can do for us.

The stress is on cross-platform utilities that allow computers and devices to talk with one another, more like mobile phones than present-day computers. This would need regulation, on the one hand, and industry-wide cooperation, on the other.

We have to remember that technologies will not be sold for themselves; they have to be able to solve people’s problems and take care of their needs in order to be adopted. For this a lot of work needs to be done, and that’s where growth is.

One sees a ray of sun burning through the multilayered mist that had formed towards the end of the century and a bit beyond. It will now be more pragmatic, rather realistic and, thus, will have longer-lasting impacts on our lives. Unrealistic salaries and statements are passé, long-lasting work and modest statements are the back-to-basics of the new IT scenario.