Ateneans connect to the world

(Celebrating Phl Internet’s 20th year) (First of two parts)

Read Part 2 here

MANILA, Philippines - It was in the wee hours of March 29, 1994 when the Philippines first became connected to the Internet. While everyone was at home, sound asleep, Filipino Benjie Tan, who then worked at ComNet (Computer Network Systems Corp.) in Makati, plugged the router Cisco 7000 through PLDT and connected with US-based Internet provider Sprint Communications. At exactly 1:15 a.m., history was made. The Philippines first connected to the Internet with a 64 Kbps bandwidth.

The successful connection was immediately reported by Tan to Dr. Rodolfo Villarica of PHnet, who would later be considered one of the fathers of Internet in the Philippines, together with Dr. William “Bill” Torres. In front of a large audience attending the First International E-mail Conference at the University of San Carlos Cebu, Dr. John Brule demonstrated a live chat with his son who was in Syracuse, New York.

“We’re in,” Brule announced. In the background, Villarica told the audience: “This is not a dial-up connection. This is the real thing. Our link to the Internet is finally live.” People in the audience were cheering and applauding this milestone. It was the first day of Internet in the country. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Ateneo played a vital role in the connection of the Philippines to the world via the Internet. In 1990, Arnie del Rosario of the Ateneo Computer Technology Center, was given a grant by Torres, then head of the National Computer Center, to come up with a study on how the Philippines could be connected to the Internet. It was only three years after that the project materialized with the formation of the “Philnet Project (now PHnet)” through the support of the DOST.

The Philnet technical committee was composed of computer specialists from the Ateneo de Manila University (Richie Lozada and Arnie del Rosario), De La Salle University (Kelsey Hartigan-Go), University of the Philippines-Diliman (Rodel Atanacio and Rommel Feria), and University of the Philippines-Los Baños.

The PHnet is “a consortium of institutions which established and operated the Philippine-wide area computer network called PHNET, formerly known as the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) Philnet project, with access to the Internet,” stated the PHnet website.

In the Phase One of the Philnet project, e-mails were sent to the Internet by routing them through Philnet’s gateway at the Ateneo, through the Victoria University of Technology in Australia. 

“Ateneo had some form of institutional ties with the Victoria University of Technology in Australia. IIRC, a visiting professor returned to VUT and set up a dialup relay for Ateneo. Other schools were allowed to dial up to Ateneo to drop/fetch their e-mails. DOST agreed to pay for the long-distance calls to Australia. We can call this as Phase 1 of the Philnet project,” said Horacio “Bombim” Cadiz, who at that time was a returning faculty member at Xavier University (Ateneo de Cagayan) and would later become the president of PHnet which became the administrator of the “edu.ph” top level domain for Philippine universities. Cadiz graduated in 1985 with a BS Math major in Computer Science from Ateneo, which was the year that Computer Science majors first graduated in the Philippines.

Phase Two of the project was the actual connection to the Internet with 64 Kbps on March 29, 1994. With the initially four members, PHnet grew over the years, acquiring more and more members who wanted to connect to the Internet.

Internet in the campus

The arrival of the Internet in Ateneo came in early. According to Dr. Pierre Tagle, the first campus network manager of Ateneo and was an assistant professor at the Department of Information Systems and Computer Science, the early period of the Internet in the Ateneo can be divided into four phases — Phase 1: Dial-up Internet; Phase 2: Actual 64 Kbps connection to the Internet (in 1994) and initial campus network; Phase 3: Campus network upgrades (1998) and formation of the Campus Network Group; and finally, Phase 4: Internet in Ateneo moving forward (from 2002 onwards).

“I spearheaded Phase 3, which was when we moved Ateneo from kilobits per second (we were connected via 192 Kbps in 1997 and I remember I can click on something, walk somewhere to get something, and come back just as a page was beginning to render in Netscape browser) to 2 Mbps. I ran into a lot of challenges there, did my rounds across the campus to get the buy-in from each school unit to put up with a higher per computer cost,” said Tagle.

He also confirmed that other schools like UST, UP, DLSU, etc. dialed up to Ateneo. “What worked in our favor is that Ateneo was most ready with phone lines, and we had the relationship with Victoria University of Technology,” Tagle said.

According to Mark Bautista, who was then a computer technician and now the IT staff supervisor of the Department of Information Systems and Computer Science, the Ateneo acted as a “local hub” for the Philippines.

“Late 1993, we are already connected to Victoria University of Technology via a 9600bps modem, as our gateway to the Internet. From there ADMU acted as the local hub for the Philippines,” he said.

(To be concluded)