My first free email - Hotmail. Completed 10 years using it!

As I opened my Hotmail inbox today, a saw a surprise message from Hotmail - Thank you for using Hotmail for last 10 years. One email brought back so many memories.
Though Internet was publicily available for Indian public from mid-1990s, not many options were available for users who couldn't afford to spend hundreds of rupees surfing the internet and then pay money to a web-based email service provider. Hotmail and Yahoo were two pioneers in providing free email services and were very popular amongst Indian users.
I was in Delhi, doing MBA from a second-grade institution (actually it wasn't worth calling it a second grade institution but I want some dignity for my foolishness of wasting 2 years studying something that I haven't applied in my last 10 years of career). My friend, Praveen, was part of an Internet startup that provided B2B services (though many such internet companies had mushroomed at that time, his company still survives). At that point of time, there was hardly anything called a Broadband connection and normal dial up connectivity was damn expensive. Surfing internet at a cafe used to cost something like 100 rupees an hour and people used internet for something like 10-15 mins to check mails. My friend's company also had 2-3 dial-up connections to run the business and during weekends, we (I and my friend) made full use of the "free" service.
It was then that I signed up for my first email account - a Hotmail account! It was damn slow, full of SPAM and opening the inbox took eternity. However, the thrill of "using internet" and being "internet savvy" was on the top of my mind and I was ready to bear the pain of slow internet connection and thousands of SPAM mails to be in touch with nobody (yes, no one wrote to me but I always made it a point to check in case some idiots from far away countries were sending me emails guaranteeing me lots of wealth, good s*x life and what not).
10-12 years have passed since then. I now use a very "high speed" internet connection that allows me to open my Hotmail inbox in a matter of few seconds (or milliseconds, I should say). There are friends (e-groups) who send me messages, though I hardly have any time to read them. I write my blog also (yes, atleast one post a year, though I wish, I could use it like my virtual diary). Technology may have changed but it is hard to forget the thrill of using a primitive Hotmail 10-12 years ago. It wasn't as sophisticated back then, but it surely provided lots of happiness and satisfaction.
Today, as we sit under mountains of data, and every day a new technology comes and vanishes in oblivion, I still feel we were better off with slow internet connection and limited knowledge. Atleast something as silly as dial up internet connection and free email excited us once a week and gave us a reason to connect next weekend.