7 years of Internet in RP
March 23, 2001 | 12:00am
It seemed it was just yesterday.
American computer professor Dr. John D. Brule may not know it. But when he held an e-mail chat with his son Mark in Syracuse, New York, from an office at the University of San Carlos in Cebu beginning 10:18 a.m. of March 29, 1994, he was actually launching a revolution that would link the Philippines to the world via the Internet.
Brule’s historic exchange of e-mails, which contained some father-and-son messages, will be remembered next week as Filipinos mark the seventh year of the Internet in this part of the globe.
Various groups of Filipino computer users led by the Philippine Internet Commerce Society (PICS) will hold different celebrations in Metro Manila, Cebu, Davao and even in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia from March 28 to 30 under the "One Internet Day" banner.
These groups are one in hailing the Internet as "the great equalizer." And they all agree that the Internet should be brought down to the remotest barrio to allow people of all shapes and ages to have access to information that could improve their lives.
In Metro Manila, the four-year-old PICS will hold a live online conference with Filipinos who helped spread the Internet gospel in the country. The conference will link a computer terminal at the Department of Trade and Industry to the computers of those pioneers who are now in various parts of the world.
In Cebu, the group CyberPromdi will hold an IT summit to promote the island as an IT investment site, while in Davao, the Information Technology Society (ITS) will give out its first Web awards for Internet sites developed by local designers.
Filipino computer programmers working in Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, will throw their own party of sorts. Grouped under the Computer Society of Filipinos, these Riyadh-based programmers will give a free seminar on March 30 and will hold a live webconference with people in Davao.
"We will have three days of action-filled celebrations," said re-electionist Sen. Ramon Magsaysay Jr., a known Internet fan and co-author of the country’s Electronic Commerce Law. "With these activities, we hope to promote further Internet use among Filipinos."
Prior to the advent of the Internet, Filipinos relied on the telephone to communicate with their friends and loved ones here and abroad. For businesses, major companies had their own international leased lines which made them more accessible to foreign firms. These mostly expensive lines were connected to fax and telex machines and used in sending and receiving data.
The coming of the Internet, however, made digital communications a lot easier and cheaper. The e-mail sent by Brule may have been a novelty, but it soon became an ordinary thing similar to conventional mail sent through the post office.
Dr. William Torres, considered the "grandfather of Philippine Internet," was part of the group that set up PHNet, the country’s first Internet service provider (ISP) which was responsible for Brule’s historic e-mail. When he was head of the National Computer Center in 1990, he commissioned a study to explore the possibility of linking several institutions together through computers. The study was done by a group led by a professor from Ateneo de Manila University, which recommended that a dial-up Internet access be established. The project, however, failed to push through.
Three years later, the Department of Science and Technology formed a group of people from the academe and provided P50,000 to establish connection with the Victoria Institute of Technology in Australia which offered free mailbox services. Ateneo de Manila University served as PHNet’s main hub and the network was used in sending and receiving e-mails from various member-colleges and universities.
PHNet proved to be a hit. In November 1993, Dr. Rodolfo Villarica, the acknowledged "father of Internet" in this country, continued the work began by Torres and the others. With a bigger budget of P12.5 million from the International Research Foundation, the PHNet began to establish an expanded network that was able to provide live Internet connection between the University of San Carlos and the US through the Sprint telephone company.
In spite of its accomplishments, PHNet still proved to be limited. For the Internet to grow, it must cater to the common tao. And commercialization is the only way to do that.
Thus, PHNet served as a sort of incubator for commercial ISPs such as Mosaic Communications (Mozcom), the Philippines’ first commercial ISP, EpicNet, IPhil, Infocom and Sequel. At that time, an Internet access cost about P65 to P80 an hour, depending on the area. In some Internet cafés that began to sprout, the access rate was as high as P150 per hour.
On the government side, the Department of Science and Technology (DOST), in 1997, put up the Science and Academe Research Network (SARNET) which was intended to connect more schools to the Internet through shared costs. It had ambitious goals. It wanted to use a 64-kilobytes per second leased line, a rarity at that time. The project eventually died a natural death due to lack of funds.
It is interesting to note that the Internet the world has today began as an experiment in 1968 by four computer science professors to link computers, scarce and very costly back then, across time zones to make use of idle computer time.
Those four professors may no longer be popular today, but without their efforts, there would be no way for people from the remotest parts of the world to access information.
The same is true for the development of Philippine Internet. Many people worked with Torres and Villarica, and many more experimented with bulletin board systems which were, in fact, the predecessor of the e-mail people use today.
Jim Ayson, a veteran Internet user and head of philmusic.com, a local music portal, said there is a need to put "oral histories" in a book to serve as permanent record of the Internet’s growth in the country.
In an e-mail, Ayson told friends that he came across the 1984 book "Fire in the Valley" which recounted the transformation of an area in California formerly used for orchards into the Silicon Valley that is filled with technology companies.
"We have a situation where every now and then some student or journalist doing research is asking for historical resources and someone has to retell the whole thing all over again because the resources aren’t there or the events haven’t been documented," he said. "It looks like we need our own ‘Fire in the Valley’ to set the record straight."
Ayson said the Philippine Internet history should not only include records of the past but also a projection of the future. "It should include the present and it should show cyberactivism," he said, pointing to the Internet’s role in uniting people against former President Joseph Estrada who was ousted on corruption charges.
Meanwhile, the Internet, without doubt, will become as pervasive as television and will surely usher a multimedia convergence in the future. It is no longer farfetched to say that the day will come when Filipinos will be talking to their loved ones in the US or Europe through their computers while watching the local soap opera or listening to the radio news through the same terminal.
Some problems may delay such a day though.
Vincent Rallon, head of the Cebu-based CyberPromdi group, said they are initiating moves to make Internet access in the province faster and cheaper.
"We are advocating for the government to recognize the existence of a backyard IT industry," he said. "The government should fine-tune its policies to provide the environment for this backyard industry to grow."
Rallon admitted, however, that the Internet and the entire local IT industry would never grow as fast as it could if the cost of Internet access would remain high. He said that since digital subscriber lines (DSL), which allow quick transfer of data, are extremely expensive in this country, there is no way for ISPs to lower their rates.
"Did you know that DSL here in Cebu costs $650 (P29,000) per month for a measly 36 kbps? In Toronto, Canada, it only costs C$60 (roughly P1,800) for a guaranteed speed of 300 kbps," he revealed.
Charles "Chuck" Gardner, an American considered as among those responsible for the growth of the Internet in the country, wrote as early as 1994 that telephone lines and a higher bandwidth are the main requirements in making the Internet accessible to all.
When he wrote his paper, Gardner predicted that by year 2000, people would no longer be using expensive local area network (LAN) terminals and would simply be flipping their "cellular-equipped portables" to connect to the Internet.
Well, his prediction is fast becoming a reality. And you can bet that in the next few years, the Internet will definitely be a totally different thing compared to what Filipinos knew seven years ago.
And it seemed it was just yesterday.
American computer professor Dr. John D. Brule may not know it. But when he held an e-mail chat with his son Mark in Syracuse, New York, from an office at the University of San Carlos in Cebu beginning 10:18 a.m. of March 29, 1994, he was actually launching a revolution that would link the Philippines to the world via the Internet.
Brule’s historic exchange of e-mails, which contained some father-and-son messages, will be remembered next week as Filipinos mark the seventh year of the Internet in this part of the globe.
Various groups of Filipino computer users led by the Philippine Internet Commerce Society (PICS) will hold different celebrations in Metro Manila, Cebu, Davao and even in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia from March 28 to 30 under the "One Internet Day" banner.
These groups are one in hailing the Internet as "the great equalizer." And they all agree that the Internet should be brought down to the remotest barrio to allow people of all shapes and ages to have access to information that could improve their lives.
In Metro Manila, the four-year-old PICS will hold a live online conference with Filipinos who helped spread the Internet gospel in the country. The conference will link a computer terminal at the Department of Trade and Industry to the computers of those pioneers who are now in various parts of the world.
In Cebu, the group CyberPromdi will hold an IT summit to promote the island as an IT investment site, while in Davao, the Information Technology Society (ITS) will give out its first Web awards for Internet sites developed by local designers.
Filipino computer programmers working in Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, will throw their own party of sorts. Grouped under the Computer Society of Filipinos, these Riyadh-based programmers will give a free seminar on March 30 and will hold a live webconference with people in Davao.
"We will have three days of action-filled celebrations," said re-electionist Sen. Ramon Magsaysay Jr., a known Internet fan and co-author of the country’s Electronic Commerce Law. "With these activities, we hope to promote further Internet use among Filipinos."
The coming of the Internet, however, made digital communications a lot easier and cheaper. The e-mail sent by Brule may have been a novelty, but it soon became an ordinary thing similar to conventional mail sent through the post office.
Dr. William Torres, considered the "grandfather of Philippine Internet," was part of the group that set up PHNet, the country’s first Internet service provider (ISP) which was responsible for Brule’s historic e-mail. When he was head of the National Computer Center in 1990, he commissioned a study to explore the possibility of linking several institutions together through computers. The study was done by a group led by a professor from Ateneo de Manila University, which recommended that a dial-up Internet access be established. The project, however, failed to push through.
Three years later, the Department of Science and Technology formed a group of people from the academe and provided P50,000 to establish connection with the Victoria Institute of Technology in Australia which offered free mailbox services. Ateneo de Manila University served as PHNet’s main hub and the network was used in sending and receiving e-mails from various member-colleges and universities.
PHNet proved to be a hit. In November 1993, Dr. Rodolfo Villarica, the acknowledged "father of Internet" in this country, continued the work began by Torres and the others. With a bigger budget of P12.5 million from the International Research Foundation, the PHNet began to establish an expanded network that was able to provide live Internet connection between the University of San Carlos and the US through the Sprint telephone company.
Thus, PHNet served as a sort of incubator for commercial ISPs such as Mosaic Communications (Mozcom), the Philippines’ first commercial ISP, EpicNet, IPhil, Infocom and Sequel. At that time, an Internet access cost about P65 to P80 an hour, depending on the area. In some Internet cafés that began to sprout, the access rate was as high as P150 per hour.
On the government side, the Department of Science and Technology (DOST), in 1997, put up the Science and Academe Research Network (SARNET) which was intended to connect more schools to the Internet through shared costs. It had ambitious goals. It wanted to use a 64-kilobytes per second leased line, a rarity at that time. The project eventually died a natural death due to lack of funds.
It is interesting to note that the Internet the world has today began as an experiment in 1968 by four computer science professors to link computers, scarce and very costly back then, across time zones to make use of idle computer time.
Those four professors may no longer be popular today, but without their efforts, there would be no way for people from the remotest parts of the world to access information.
The same is true for the development of Philippine Internet. Many people worked with Torres and Villarica, and many more experimented with bulletin board systems which were, in fact, the predecessor of the e-mail people use today.
Jim Ayson, a veteran Internet user and head of philmusic.com, a local music portal, said there is a need to put "oral histories" in a book to serve as permanent record of the Internet’s growth in the country.
In an e-mail, Ayson told friends that he came across the 1984 book "Fire in the Valley" which recounted the transformation of an area in California formerly used for orchards into the Silicon Valley that is filled with technology companies.
"We have a situation where every now and then some student or journalist doing research is asking for historical resources and someone has to retell the whole thing all over again because the resources aren’t there or the events haven’t been documented," he said. "It looks like we need our own ‘Fire in the Valley’ to set the record straight."
Ayson said the Philippine Internet history should not only include records of the past but also a projection of the future. "It should include the present and it should show cyberactivism," he said, pointing to the Internet’s role in uniting people against former President Joseph Estrada who was ousted on corruption charges.
Some problems may delay such a day though.
Vincent Rallon, head of the Cebu-based CyberPromdi group, said they are initiating moves to make Internet access in the province faster and cheaper.
"We are advocating for the government to recognize the existence of a backyard IT industry," he said. "The government should fine-tune its policies to provide the environment for this backyard industry to grow."
Rallon admitted, however, that the Internet and the entire local IT industry would never grow as fast as it could if the cost of Internet access would remain high. He said that since digital subscriber lines (DSL), which allow quick transfer of data, are extremely expensive in this country, there is no way for ISPs to lower their rates.
"Did you know that DSL here in Cebu costs $650 (P29,000) per month for a measly 36 kbps? In Toronto, Canada, it only costs C$60 (roughly P1,800) for a guaranteed speed of 300 kbps," he revealed.
Charles "Chuck" Gardner, an American considered as among those responsible for the growth of the Internet in the country, wrote as early as 1994 that telephone lines and a higher bandwidth are the main requirements in making the Internet accessible to all.
When he wrote his paper, Gardner predicted that by year 2000, people would no longer be using expensive local area network (LAN) terminals and would simply be flipping their "cellular-equipped portables" to connect to the Internet.
Well, his prediction is fast becoming a reality. And you can bet that in the next few years, the Internet will definitely be a totally different thing compared to what Filipinos knew seven years ago.
And it seemed it was just yesterday.
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