By: Jerome Auza
The Internet seems to be a natural thing nowadays but for the pioneers, 20 years after the first time the country was officially connected to the Internet via selected colleges and universities, those times were unforgettable.
I consider myself lucky being one of the pioneers at the University of San Carlos – Talamban Campus when I was a fourth year college student taking electronics and communications engineering. Back then, getting hold of a technical book at the library is just like winning the lottery. You’d be lucky to be able to borrow a book about programming or software development. You are competing for a few books with an army of hundreds of students.
At that time, the USC-TC organized its Center for Network Management and Services which essentially was the implementing arm of the university for the PHNet project (http://www.ph.net/about.html). I volunteered to do something on the UNIX server which was a computer only a handful of students would ever have access at that time. If you were somehow involved in the PHNet project, chances are you may have seen an email from me which was adm@durian.usc.edu.ph at that time. We named our servers at USC-TC after fruit trees.
The center has one of the largest bandwidths available at that time: 64kbps! And there were dial-up users who were so happy at one time when we upgraded their modem connections to 14.4kbps from 9.6kbps. My main job was to monitor the usage and provide utilization reports of the modems. At that time, you had a limited set of programming languages available: C language and some scripting languages called bourne, C-shell and Korn-shell. I chose C and good thing on the UNIX system, you can type: man printf and then you will see a guide on how to use the command printf in C language. I guess that’s where I started my journey into software development.
The team and the center would send emails using Pine, Elm and sendmail. We chat with each other and other people on PHNet and the Internet using talk, ytalk and irc. We open websites using NCSA browser and later on Netscape Navigator. The user interfaces are a far cry from what we have now on Facebook, Google+ and other social networks and chat software but nonetheless, we communicated instantly to people around the world.
Did you know that we even held an International Email Conference at USC-TC? Nowadays, we don’t give much thought to emails. Back then, it wasn’t an easy concept to grasp.
Now, we complain if we can’t get 2MBPS at least. Now, we get impatient if a website loads more than 10 seconds (we were lucky to be able to load Yahoo! website in a few minutes). Now we use graphics for smileys but back then, we had to use letters and turn our heads a bit to the side to see the smiley. 🙂 😀 😛 😉
Twenty years on, our country doesn’t have a neutral network exchange between our biggest telcos: Globe and PLDT. So data traffic from PLDT still has to go around the International submarine cables before it reaches a subscriber using Globe and vice versa. Such an inefficient use of expensive resource should be banned by the Philippine government. Globe and PLDT should really shake hands and just route local traffic within the country. That will free up a lot of bandwidth for the real international data traffic.
Twenty years on, it’s still difficult to get a telephone line at many areas in Tagbilaran City, including near the office of Auza.Net– we can’t get an additional telephone line. I’m not even hoping for a new DSL line yet. Maybe in a few years… maybe at the 25th anniversary.
But despite the challenges, that time 20 years ago ushered us into the Information age, opening up so much opportunity and capabilities for our country. No longer do lack of books deny us of knowledge. Communication around the world became instant, enriching and engaging. The Internet has become the equalizer, giving everyone access to as much information as needed. Oppressive governments have been toppled by citizens organized via Twitter and Facebook. Relief efforts for the recent disasters were coordinated in social networks.
I am very grateful to my alma mater, USC-TC, for giving me the opportunity at the best possible time for me. I am grateful as well to my colleagues and our mentors at USC-TC CNMS who helped us understand what was going on with the network. I am grateful to all the people we connected to virtually at that time. Happy 20th anniversary to us, and to the Internet in the Philippines.