Since Ajay was awake all night long sending messages and scheduling interviews with various college radio stations, Ajay only got to sleep for four hours yesterday.
With the intent of making up for lost sleep, he slept early the other night and wanted to actually sleep more than five hours, but unfortunately, he was woken up rudely by the continuous beeping of his server.
His eyes were red as he quickly inspected the server, and to his astonishment, all the bandwidth was used up. There were currently over 300 people on his website.
"What the fuck happened?"
He was shocked, but knowing that any attention is good attention, he got to work almost immediately.
He could not increase the bandwidth of his internet to make more people access his website, but he could reduce their inconvenience.
So he quickly coded a Batch Entry System.
He locked the maximum number of users that could enter the website at 250 after considering the smooth experience of everyone, and quickly wrote the script for an automatic kicking out and letting in system.
The idea was simple. After ten minutes, which he felt was more than enough, all 250 users on the website would be kicked out, and the users who were waiting in the queue would be let in.
He had to write an IP tracking algorithm, assign unique identification codes for each IP, and then make use of the clock to make everything work.
After he was done writing the code, he quickly pushed an alert message to all the users within the website, stating that the website would go into maintenance for a short while.
Brandon Polovsky, a professor at UCLA, was startled by the alert message. Then his eyes brightened.
"What an elegant system! Why didn't anyone think of that? Gosh, it's so marvellous!"
Suddenly, a bunch of students watched what he was doing from behind.
"What is it, Professor? You seem surprised."
The professor looked back at his students and once again turned his attention to the computer.
"It's this website called Jay Studios. It's supposed to be a personal website of a songwriter, but it is unexpectedly brilliant."
"How so?" one of the students asked curiously.
"How do I explain it?" The middle-aged man scratched his balding head and, unable to describe it in a few words, immediately switched to a different website and demonstrated.
"No matter which website I go to, I usually have to spend several minutes understanding how it works. Look at this website. If I have to go to the bulletin board, I will have to click the button in the corner here."
"If I have to go to the archive, I will have to go into this option and then choose this option."
He then switched to another website and continued to explain.
"It's the same problem on this website as well. Notice how everything is right in front of you and kind of overwhelms you?"
The students responded, confused.
"But isn't that how all the websites are?"
"Yes, exactly." The professor excitedly nodded. "And that's exactly why Jay Studios is special."
"The first time I entered the website, I actually didn't have to guess anything."
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"It did not overwhelm me. It presented me with a simple profile, some information, and the content."
"There was plenty of unused space and empty space throughout the website."
"Professor, that means the website is not properly optimised?" one of the young men asked, correcting his glasses.
"That's what I would have thought as well, but after looking at this website, I no longer think so. I realised just now that our human brain cannot process all the information at once. It needs some space to breathe; it needs some empty gaps. Jay Studios.com provides exactly that. He gets straight to the point while not overwhelming the senses."
"Besides, he has somehow implemented an alert system at the very core of his website, so no matter what he wants to convey to the users who are using it, he could do it from his server itself without making abrupt changes to the website."
Listening to their professor speaking so much, the students got curious as well, so they pestered him to open the website, but the professor shook his head and smiled wryly.
"It just went offline. The developer seems to be making some changes." He said and, unconsciously, once again entered the link he had etched into his mind.
But to his surprise, an error didn't appear. Instead, a notice appeared.
"Hello, user 342, the lobby is full, but worry not, you are in the first waiting batch. You'll be allowed to enter the website in T-minus ten minutes."
"Wow, what is that?"
The student with the glasses exclaimed and came forward, bringing his face closer to the computer. The professor was surprised as well. He took a few minutes to understand what the notice meant, but when he did, his eyes widened, and his very being was filled with enthusiasm.
"Brilliant! How brilliant!"
One of the students who didn't understand what was happening asked, "What is it, Professor?"
"It's a queuing system." The professor looked back, his eyes brimming with energy. "The developer seemed to have encountered a bottleneck in something, so he seems to have built this queuing system."
"How brilliant! Why has no one thought of this solution before?"
Currently, if there is an overload of users, the server is either expanded or all the servers run as they are, lagging until they are expanded, but no one has ever thought about creating a queuing system to let people in batches.
"How is the developer identifying which user is waiting to get into the website and which user is not? Is he using a tracking algorithm as well? How interesting!" the boy with the glasses muttered, causing the teacher to nod repeatedly.
Eventually, the ten minutes passed, and the screen immediately changed.
They were successfully logged in to the website.
The professor nodded in satisfaction after looking at the familiar layout, but the students were taken aback.
They couldn't visualise the image described by the professor before, but now that they were looking at it, indeed, the website was something that they had never seen before.
It looked so clean, so refined, and the design was so professional and so easy to understand.
"Wow! It says here that he was the one who wrote "Thrift Shop." He is actually such a good developer?"
Everyone's attention was immediately turned towards the boy who exclaimed in surprise.
"You know him?" the girl in the group asked.
"Well, I bought the cassette for Thrift Shop. It was a good single."
Everyone was in awe. Just then, the guy with the glasses noticed something.
"Professor, it says 'click here.' Do as it says."
The professor nodded and brought his mouse to the GIF that was alternating between multiple images and clicked it.
Immediately, an hourglass symbol appeared, and only a few seconds later, a soothing piano melody blasted through the speaker.
The guys looked at each other, and especially the girl in the group felt like the song was quite melodious and decided to pay attention to it after remembering the song's name.
However, the professor and the guy with the eyeglasses caught on to something different entirely.
"Professor, it's not buffering."
"Yes, I noticed that as well. Even if it is a GIF of only a few KB, media usually buffers, but what sort of sorcery did this developer use?"
The professor felt like getting to the bottom of the mystery, so he quickly opened the terminal and hit several lines of command.
After realising what was happening, he was once again shocked.
"This developer, how come he has so many ideas?"
The guy with the specs grew curious.
"He is actually unloading part of the data of the GIF onto the user's own computer."
"So if the GIF is 10 KB, he's unloading almost the entire 10 KB of data onto the user's own computer. When we hit play, it is not actually the developer's server playing the sound. It is our own computer."
The boy's eyes widened, and suddenly a light bulb went off in his mind. He suddenly got an idea, a bold one, but he pressed it deep in his heart and continued to watch the website until they were eventually kicked away and joined another batch, this time, Batch 5, where they had to wait 50 minutes to get into the website.
The world of the internet in 1994 was very small. It was a world of intellectuals and internet geeks. When something interesting happened on the internet, it spread like wildfire and eventually blew out of control.
As for Ajay, he had once again collapsed onto the bed, having sweet dreams about getting his second platinum single and producing his first-ever album with a bunch of world-famous artists.
P.S. Hey everyone, if you aren't aware, I am also writing another novel alongside this one, a post-apocalyptic fantasy novel. If you like the genre, please check it out.