The contributor, Chong Shang Shan, is an A*STAR scientist. He can be reached at chongss(at)gmail.com.

As I look at the Taiwan Telco Tsunami (TTT), I can't help but feel nostalgic about a former era, 10 years ago.

I was introduced to the internet in 1994 in an academic environment. Back then, the web's presence made itself felt in the application known as Netscape Navigator. Webpages consisted of homepages made by individuals, coding each individual HTML tag by hand. While there were links, there was hardly any interactive content.

Instead of the web, we had email, news and telnet. Email needs no explanation, except you should know that we did not use any fancy web interfaces to access email. We accessed email through screen applications, for example, PINE. Telnet allowed one to connect to arbitrary services, many of which were germinal forms of chat or MMORPG.

Now what is news? In this day of news blogs, online news content and glitzy web papers, we tend to think of news in those terms. I am referring to not to these, but to USENET and NETNEWS.

How was USENET structured? News repositories were set up in computer centers in research and academic environments. The articles were organized in hierarchies. There was a schedule of news propagation amongst computer centers. People used client newsreaders to download, subscribe to and read the articles (mostly text), followed by posting their replies and responses to them.

This mode of interactivity apparently worked. It's different now: to gain access to USENET, you go through Google Groups, and precious few local ISPs. There are still people using it, but the vast volumes of people are content to use the web, which demands a level of interactivity and bandwidth that just was not present then.

Will Google still be there in another TTT? News, however, can be better exchanged. As someone who understand computers, I can confidently say that then, our system of getting news was more robust towards catastrophes like TTT.

Before you come at me with your counterexamples (for example, September 11), bear in mind that in those catastrophes, the net worked, while the catastrophe happened elsewhere. My issue is what happens which the net connection is intermittent and only partially works.

As a sometime open source advocate, this is my wish: that the world get a better message passing mechanism. The present blogs, online newspapers, RSS aggregators and feeds just don't cut it, If we have to return to those technological days to gain robustness, I would gladly do so.

But the river of technological change flows forward always, so the right response is to architect our systems to support such interaction. It's not just about laying alternative cable routes and increasing bandwidth - that only postpones problems, not fix it at a fundamental level. We should be critically examining the manner with which we interact with our computers and each other. This is the true way to avoid the consequences of such a catastrophe.

I gladly welcome suggestions about possible features of software and systems in such a contingency.