The Day the Philippines Hooked Up to the Net: Part 6 – Aftermath

In the conclusion of our web series “The Day the Philippines Hooked Up to the Net,” we take a look at some of the immediate effects of the events of March 29, 1994. After the success of the first connection, Philnet paved the way for wiring up both the universities and the private sector (through the first commercial ISP, MosCom – which was connected to Philnet), allowing more Filipinos to access the Internet.

This had a ripple effect, accelerating the rate of knowledge of networks, and the legacy is today’s local online and Internet scene, where Internet Service Providers (now largely dominated by telecommunications firms) vigorously compete to provide Filipinos Internet access. Filipino society itself has been irreversibly altered by the exposure to online communications.

By 2011, Filipinos became the world’s leading practitioners of social media. All these were set in motion by the effects of that day in March 1994.

This article is adapted from a piece originally published in March 2001.

(Continued from Part 5) 

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Conclusion: Aftermath

When the Philnet technical committee went back home after the conference, there was an immediate flurry of activity. At the Ateneo de Manila, Linux enthusiast Dr. Pablo Manalastas began doing what he had been waiting for weeks. He proceeded to download an entire Linux distribution from Finland. With very little activity on the new network, this went by pretty fast.

Others were swamped with requests for information. “I was answering something like 15 calls an hour from all over,” recalled Kelsey Hartigan Go at DLSU. “Trying to explain what the Internet is, what you need to connect, why it was expensive, from people who didn’t know a moonier from a keyboard, t techies who think they know everything but had to ask anyway. That went on for a few months.”

“I also had to answer a lot of e-mail queries from everywhere,” he added. “Such as what’s the plan for Philnet, when will it reach Tugeugerao, or Davao, how to connect this school and that… how to bring Usenet and STACnet to the rest of the Philnet community. Everybody was ecstatic, and they wanted so many things.”

It was a more innocent time, before the commercialization of the Internet as we know it today. And there was a drive to share a special kind of knowledge with everyone.

Bombim Cadiz mused about that period. “I do get nostalgic about the camaraderie when by everyone who was involved in the Internet evangelization and the pioneering spirit. Most of all, I just find it satisfying that PHNET was able to get the Internet into the Philippines and find all the difficulties worth it.”

Richie Lozada summed it up. “It was a pretty exciting time to be in.”

Immediately after the Cebu Email conference, I wrote my own summary of the event and posted it on the Usenet group soc.culture.filipino.

It’s interesting that one early concern discussed was the possibility of online pornography:

A participant expressed concern about the possibility of obscene material coming into the Philippines from the Internet and being accessed by minors. Others expressed concern that heavy users of the Net  would be benefitting tremendously from the fixed charges and wasting  bandwidth at the expense of light users.

The Philnet panel took a common stand that it has no business policing the content of the data. As some participants said, once you start
censoring content, the next step could be censoring political messages  as well. Philnet does intend to monitor however the volume of data traffic passing through the nodes, and primary nodes that exceed the  upper limits will be charged accordingly.

Click here to read the full summary.

Hooked Part 5: Off to Cebu – The First Contact

In this installment of our series on The Day the Philippines Hooked Up To the Internet, the Philnet crew converges in Cebu where the connection to the Net finally took place. The historic day was March 29, 1994.

This series is based on an account originally published in March 2001.

(continued from Part 4)

Off to Cebu

As the end of March 1994 drew near, preparations were underway for Dr. John Brule’s “First International E-Mail Conference” at the University of San Carlos (USC) in Talamban, Cebu. It was billed as a three-day conference, from March 27 to 29. Prior to the conference, Brule had been burning up the e-mail lines sending information about the conference using Philnet’s early dial-up connections. USC also had an alternate dialup e-mail connection via the NEC offices in Cebu, which had a dialup link via Japan. There were also Fidonet BBS networks in Cebu that provided e-mail accounts to the public for a small annual fee.

Over at the STACnet mailing list, enthusiasm for the conference ran high. STACnet was an e-mail list composed of Filipino expatriates in technical fields, running off a list server in a research institute in Sweden. It was started by the Department of Foreign Affairs and centered on discussions about how overseas Filipinos could give something back to the Philippines. The E-Mail Conference in Cenu held the promise of having them “show off” Internet applications to their kababayan (countrymen), and a number of members from the US and Europe made plans to attend or give talks in Cebu.

Invitations were sent to the Philnet technical committee, academics and students, prominent local cyberspace netizens. and even the early Philippine professional e-mail providers. It was suddenly “the” event of the early online community.

Hooked Part 4: Showdown at the .PH Corral

In Part 4 of our series, “The Day the Philippines Hooked Up to the Net”, we have our first encounter with the PH Domain administrator.

This was originally published in March 2001.

(continued from Part 3)

Showdown at the PH Corral

Sometime during the first week of March, Dr. Rudy Villarica and members of the Philnet Technical Committee (Arnie Del Rosario, Richie Lozada, and Kelsey Hartigan-Go) sat down for a meeting at Club Filipino in San Juan with Joel Disini. Then, as now, Disini was the administrator of the top-level domain (TLD) for the Republic of the Philippines, .PH(pronounced “dot PH”).

Sometime in 1990, Disini obtained an appointment from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to act as the .PH domain administrator. IANA was in the process of creating the first country-code TLDs and was handing them over for free on a first come, first served basis to individuals who applied who could prove they were technically competent. Of course, in 1990, there was hardly any interest in the Internet in the Philippines.

Philnet believed the .PH domain should be handled not by an individual, but by a foundation that was promoting the use of the Internet in the country. Besides, being backed by the Department of Science and Technology, they believed they had the authority of the Philippine government on the matter.

Villarica recalls the Club Filipino meeting: “We wanted him to turn over the administration of .PH to us. Philnet wanted to be a single point of contact for connecting to the Internet. We brought it up. We asked him to give it to us. Kelsey, Richie, Arnie were saying that the .PH domain should really belong to Philnet because we were going to provide the first full Internet access in the Philippines. Secondly, it’s a foundation. And at the time, there was really no money in the Internet or in domain administration. It was free at the time and administrators were unpaid volunteers.”

But it wasn’t meant to be. According to Villarica, Disini’s reaction was to ask what he would get in return. He claimed he had invested about P50,000 to P60,000 in trips to the US and other related expenses. Disini also said he would consider if he got direct leased-line access to Philnet.

Villarica balked. “It would have jeopardized the setup,” he recalls. “Giving him the leased line for free would put him on the level of the preferred partners.”

The Day the Philippines Hooked Up to the Net: Part 3 (The Cisco Kids)

In Part 3 of our continuing series chronicling the events leading up to the first Philippine Internet connection, we follow our hero, Dr. Rudy Villarica, as he continued to make the rounds gathering resources for the connection. From getting the funding, to procuring the Cisco routers and the know-how to get them running, to signing the contract with PLDT for the leased line to connect to the Net. At a speed of 64K, this was positively glacial by today’s standards, but it was to be the country’s only direct connection to the Internet for some time.

This article was originally written and published in March 2001.

(Continued from Part 2) 

Telcos and Ciscos  

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With Dr. Villarica back in Manila by the first week of December 1993, work moved fast on the shopping list prepared by the Philnet technical committee. The first order of business was to get the leased lines from the telcos. Philnet would be needing an international private line or IPL to connect from Philnet’s router to the Internet provider selected in the US, Sprint Communications. They would also need leased lines for all the universities involved to connect to Philnet.

By this time, the Philnet project had expanded outside Metro Manila schools to include UP Los Baños in Laguna, St. Louis University in Baguio, Univerity of San Carlos in Cebu and Xavier University in Cagayan de Oro. New points in Metro Manila included DOST-Advanced Science and Technology Institute in UP Diliman and the University of Santo Tomas.

Villarica lined up meetings with five of the top leased line providers.

Invariably they would be asked: “By the way, do you have the money for this?” He always managed to quickly answer: “No, but the project has been approved by the DOST, so the money is on it’s way, don’t worry.”

Eventually the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) was selected since it gave the best price. A 64-Kbps IPL for USD$10,000 per month and local leased lines for all the nodes for P130,000 per month.

The Day the Philippines Hooked Up to the Net: Part 2 (Enter the Doctor)

Presenting part two of our story of the events leading up to the first Philippine Internet connection on March 29, 1994.

In this installment, we introduce a new character to our story, Dr. Rudy Villarica, who became so instrumental to the effort, he is often referred to today as “The Father of Philippine Internet”.

This story was originally published in March 2001 in the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

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Part 2: Enter the Doctor

A screen capture of Dr. Villarica giving a speech in 2007.

(Continued from Part 1.)

The second phase of Philnet brought into the picture an entirely new personality. Dr. Rudy Villarica, a chemist by training, had gone through a colorful career that allowed him to merge an interest in science and engineering with business and industry. He had been involved in building plants and factories and at one point even served as the director of the DTI’s Board of Investments (BOI). Now mainly retired, he spent much of his time with nonprofit foundations like the Industrial Research Foundation (IRF). It was while he was with the IRF that an opportunity dropped into his lap to be the captain who would steer Philnet’s course into a live Internet connection.

The Day the Philippines Hooked Up to the Net: Part 1

On March 29, 1994, the Philippines was connected to the Internet for the first time. It was the result of the work of a dedicated group: very young computer science teachers from the country’s leading universities, seasoned project managers, and network engineers. This is their story.

This piece was originally published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on March 26-27, 2001.

In commemoration of the 25th anniversary of Philippine Cyberspace, we are serializing it on this blog, the first time it has been published on the web in ten years.

The Night Benjie Tan Hooked up the Philippines to the Internet

Magoo's Pizza plays a role in this story.

In March 2001, I pitched a story to the Inquirer. The 7th Anniversary of the Philippine connection to the Internet was coming up (the exact date is March 29, 1994). Would they be interested in an account of the events of that day?

My idea was to retell the story in narrative form, similar to the techniques used in non-fiction tech classics like “The Soul of the New Machine” and  ”Pirates of Silicon Valley” (and more recently, “Accidental Billionaires” which became the basis for the film “The Social Network.”) The editors said yes, so I went off and interviewed some of the principals involved in that historic event.

The result was two stories – the main story was serialized in two parts, published in print over two days . A sidebar that went overboard was the untold story of how Benjie Tan, an engineer at Comnet, actually made the country’s first connection to the Internet the evening before the big announcement on March 29. He celebrated alone with a box of Magoo’s Pizza.

That sidebar was deemed to long for print and appeared only in the web, and even went off-line eventually. I managed to retrieve it using the Wayback Machine, and am putting it here for new audiences to read. Here is Benjie’s story.