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Dr. Xing Li: A Pioneer in Developing the Chinese Internet

mingram — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 18:20:33 +0000

In 1988, when Xing Li discovered that he could send text-based messages instantly from Philadelphia in the United States to his wife in Edinburgh, Scotland, he was understandably excited.

A graduate student in electrical and computer engineering at Drexel University, Li was studying signal processing. “Electrical and computer engineering was not the first department connected to the Internet,” he says. “Rather, math and computer science was connected. I heard about email from some of those students and approached a professor to give me an account. I paid AT&T lots of money for phone calls until we started sending this new thing called email that was much better than telephone and letters. It was instant and free.”

That Li was interested in the ability to send information across the world was no surprise. As a quiet child growing up in Beijing, Li had built electronics with his hands, fabricating amateur radios and constructed other devices during his free time. His family and friends snapped up the converters he assembled to translate channel frequency from the color television band into black and white. Now they could watch both television channels available at the time.

To formally study electronic engineering was a dream for Li, but one that the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and 70s almost quashed. “I was in middle school during that time. You did what the government told you. After high school, I worked in a factory for three years because the universities had stopped giving entrance exams. But I earned good experience as a petro-mechanical factory bench worker, using my hands to repaired machines for the oil industry.”

Fortunately, Li did eventually gain entry into Beijing’s Tsinghua University. In 1982 he earned his degree in radio electronics, then headed to the United States to complete his Masters in ultrasound signal processing in 1985 and PhD in 1989.

His first impression of the Internet at Drexel was that it would change not only his work - because now scholars from around the world could share ideas and research - but that it would revolutionize the world by giving access to software, information and communication at no or low cost.

“I knew that the Internet could be a little bit of what it is today. I was working on multimedia communication at Drexel. Though the Internet was only plain text, I knew even at that time, being in electrical engineering and with my background in radio signal processing, that images and sounds would be sent eventually – that the Internet would be multimedia enabled. But I didn’t have the imagination at the time, not being a businessman, to realize the electronic commerce we would now do in everyday life. But I took my knowledge back to China to help make China Internet enabled.”

He returned to Beijing in 1991 to teach at his undergraduate alma mater, and to the unhappy reality that there was no Internet access at all in his home country. So he started telling everyone he met how great this new technology was.

“I shouted a lot about it. Three years later, the government started to realize how important the Internet was. They formed a team to work on creating it in China. The president of the university also had a similar vision and had formed our own team. We developed what would become CERNET, the China Education and Research Network, to connect more than 2,000 Chinese universities and eventually 320 million students,” he says.

Li started the first IPv6 testbed in China in 1997 and he was the principal architect of CERNET2 in 2003, linking more than 500 universities via an IPv6-only network, the largest IPv6-only network in the world and a response to the lack of available unique addresses in the previous IPv4 network. He was also the driving force behind establishing the China Next Generation Internet Exchange Center (CNGI-6IX), the IPv6 exchange point linking China with the global Internet. He is also one of the major contributors in IETF for the IPv4/IPv6 translation technology.

Another achievement Li recounts is that as a Drexel student, he wrote an application to display Chinese Hanzi characters on early Apple Macintosh operating systems. He did this so that he could read Chinese versions of electronic journals. He then uploaded the code as freeware. The code found an eager audience. When he returned to China, he says he found his code being used as a Mosaic plug-in for Chinese articles.

Li’s decades of pioneering work developing the Internet in China and his active participation in multiple global organizations to support Internet growth has brought together experts inside and outside China to share ideas and information on networking, including APNG, APIA, APNIC, APAN, CCIRN and IAB. Recently, his interest has extended more broadly. The Bright Internet Project Consortium named him the winner of Bright Internet Award in 2019. This honor recognizes scholars whose achievements and contributions in the field of management information systems promote a more sustainable, secure and trustworthy Internet.

Li thinks this is a critical time for the Internet. “We have to avoid a split and fragmentation of the Internet, because there are lots of things blocking access – political, technical, etc. I don’t like the idea of centralization, either. I’ve always believed in the concept of a single Internet, no matter where located or what technology used. The Internet needs to remain distributed just like it was originally, not controlled by corporations or governments. It should evolve because we don’t want ossification. Privacy is also very important when we are online, and it is very challenging in China and globally. But history is long, and I believe it will all work out.”

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Xing Li

Better Communication is Better for Mankind

mingram — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 18:11:04 +0000

Frode Greisen’s understated manner belies the vast influence he has had on the expansion of the Internet in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Iran, especially in areas where at times cooperation was unlikely and unwelcome.

“I feel lucky to have met with people who had vision and who understood,” says the Denmark native who, in the 1980s and 1990s, led the European Research and Education Network (EARN) and the European Internet backbone, EBONE. The development and deployment of both of these systems were fundamental to the modern European Internet.

How did someone with such impact get his start? “I had an affection for logic and mathematics,” says Greisen of his early academic career. Those pursuits led him to study the movement of electrons in metal. But his hoped-for physics career didn’t take off: “I knew about electrons in metal but not much else.” So he launched into business, selling IBM computers to the Danish healthcare system. That experience gave him a view into how other countries, notably the United States, were innovating with computers. It also pointed out important differences: in the U.S., the healthcare system relied on computers primarily for financial transactions; in Denmark, computers within the healthcare system were poised to do more and held the potential to create vital communications networks.

Those networking possibilities intrigued the science-loving Greisen, who didn’t want to spend life as a salesperson. With his growing knowledge of computers, he took a job in management of a university computer center. “At that time, around 1980, there was an international trend toward computer networking,” he notes. “The center was in one location but the scientists were spread out. I was helping organize the systems for the scientists.”

While he was at the computer center, Greisen was sent to join a meeting about building a European version of BITNET, the U.S. university network co-founded in 1981 by Ira Fuchs (IHOF 2017). The network Greisen and colleagues in other countries developed following that experience launched as EARN in 1985. EARN’s mandate was to create a non-commercial network for universities and research facilities in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Academic and research institutions could be full members of EARN if they agreed to host one node and connect their systems with other member institutions. EARN itself was connected to BITNET. “When I got my first message on EARN,” says Greisen, “I had an IBM terminal on my desk in Denmark and suddenly, I’m ‘in’ Germany. Desk-to-desk communication. I thought, ‘This beats the fax!’”

EARN launched with just a handful of nations in addition to Denmark: France, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden. Throughout Europe, Greisen faced significant challenges imposed by state-held telecommunications agencies and other government organizations. He facilitated lengthy negotiations with the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) to legalize the flow of data and equipment on the continent.

“And of course, at that time there was the problem that we couldn’t communicate with the Eastern Bloc,” says Greisen. The obstacles to communication included bans on the export of technologies that might be used in warfare, restrictions that included supercomputers. Connections to the Eastern Bloc countries didn’t come until after the fall of the Berlin wall in December 1989. EARN then expanded eastward, first to Poland in the spring of 1990 with the help of a colleague at the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN). Czechoslovakia followed soon after with the help of the “father” of the Czech Internet, Jan Gruntorád (IHOF 2022).

“Africa and the Middle East were on the books from the outset,” points out Greisen about EARN’s expansion plans, and Israel as well was soon online. Greisen says his efforts to expand EARN to more and more nations was driven by logic: “It’s practical for science if we can communicate.”

As networks expanded globally, it became clear that the smaller EARN network would benefit from connections outside its membership. “We were connecting 300 IBM computers,” says Greisen. “Ok, maybe it was 1,000, but a lot of computing went on outside of those computers.” EARN merged with its sibling organization, Réseaux Associés pour la Recherche Européenne (RARE), to form the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association (TERENA) in 1994. TERENA is now known as GEANT.

Worldwide communication was growing rapidly, but because most databases were still in the United States, even local European web traffic had to go to the U.S. and back before reaching its destination. “We said, ‘Well, that is all fine, but if there is communication from Denmark to France, why should it have to go through the United States?’” says Greisen. “We want the intra-European traffic to go by Europe because that’s cheaper and faster.” This perspective was the beginning of the thinking that built a European Internet backbone, or EBONE.

In the early stages of establishing EBONE, Greisen and his European colleagues set up a system where some parties provided links and others operated nodes connecting the links. “All parties could connect to a node and pay a fraction according to the bandwidth they got,” explains Greisen.

This work was a part-time endeavor for Geisen beginning in 1992 but grew into full-time work when EBONE was established as a profit-making company. “Initially, it was not supposed to make a surplus, it was just supposed to build a service for members and distribute costs and income according to use,” says Greisen. “I was happy that the board was not in it to make a profit. They were in it to have something that worked and provided better service all the time.” But in the eight years of its existence, EBONE did, in fact, make profits. It grew to link more than 100 Internet service providers in Europe, playing a critical role as the European Internet transitioned from an academic research network to the Internet used daily by hundreds of millions of Europeans.

Today, Greisen himself relies less and less on the Internet he helped expand. “I think in many ways we are over-digitizing.” Looking back on his contributions to connecting the world, Greisen says he still believes, “... scientific cooperation is good for mankind and better communication is better for mankind.” But connecting infrastructure to the Internet can be extremely dangerous”. And by the way, he continues in his understated way, “I see no need for my refrigerator to be connected to the Internet.”

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Frode Greisen

Jan Gruntorád, the Father of the Czech Internet

mingram — Wed, 28 Sep 2022 02:57:08 +0000

It’s no mean feat to be considered the progenitor of anything, much less the person to bring revolutionary technology to an entire country. Jan Gruntorád, proud papa and grandfather, has also been called the “father of the Czech Internet.”

He takes as much pride in this moniker as he does his actual progeny. “In the past I was working so hard I did not have much time with them. We now have six grandchildren and I would like to spend time with them.”

The demanding work to which Gruntorád refers is the more than 30 years he has advocated for and promoted electronic connectivity in the scientific and education communities in what was once Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic, and the former Iron Curtain countries of Eastern Europe. In 2021, he officially retired from his position as Managing Director of CESNET, the association of universities of the Czech Republic and the Czech Academy of Sciences that he helped found three decades earlier. CESNET developed and continues to operate the Czech national computer network, data storage and collaborative environment that comprises the country’s e-infrastructure for science, research and education.

If this one area of focus were not enough to bring national and international prestige, Gruntorád was also one of the founders of CEENET, the Central and Eastern European Networking Association in 1998. This organization educated national governments on the importance of having network infrastructure, and trained engineers in computer networking and how to build Internet capabilities in their home countries - including former Soviet republics.

“During that period [1998-2003], I intensively worked on introducing and improving Internet services in the research and development environment. I also served as a consultant for NATO in the area of the Caucasus and was responsible for upgrading the IP network for the R&D community in Azerbaijan.” he says.

He also represented the Czech Republic on the Board of Directors of EBONE, the pan-European Internet provider based in Copenhagen, and was a member of the Board of Directors of DANTE (now GÉANT), operating a pan-European academic network. Gruntorád helped establish independent Czech organizations administering the national domain CZ.NIC and the neutral peering network node NIX.CZ. In 2016, he received the international Vietsch Foundation Medal for his significant contributions to the research and development of advanced Internet technologies for the support of science, research and higher education.

It was fellow Internet Hall of Fame member and one of the creators of the Internet, Vint Cerf, who first called Gruntorád “the father of the Internet in the Czech Republic.” Though now retired, Gruntorád is still lending his expertise to CESNET to wrap up projects integrating all IT services for Czech research and education communities.

“We’re providing networking services and participate in developing and operating the cloud and storage center at the University of Brno, integrating these services with other Czech universities. We’ve already upgraded the optical network capabilities and the IP infrastructure, and installed new, faster routers. These upgrades will be done by the end of 2022. The current backbone is not fast enough for transmitting the results of supercomputers. The demands of the users require higher speeds for their current applications,” he says. And, while Gruntorád currently serves on the board of e-IRG, a strategic body that facilitates integration in European e-infrastructures and connected services, within and between member states, at the European level and globally, he adds, “this work needs to be done in a way that there is no interruption of services. Then I will really retire.”

Gruntorád grew up and attended school in the Moravian city of Olomouc about 250 kilometers east of Prague. The town is known for its majestic Holy Trinity Column monument and church, a UNESCO World Heritage site built in the early 1700s, as well as Palacký University, the second oldest in the Czech Republic. This was fortunate for a child in the 1960s, when the country was under Communist control, Gruntorád was able to study English. His facility with the language landed him a four-month fellowship in Denmark as he was studying for his PhD in electrical engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague.

“During my studies, I focused on control systems for production lines in factories, mostly related to robots,” he says. “But I turned to data communication and computer engineering after I was one of ten engineers selected to go to Great Britain for training on the ICL 4-72 [an early mainframe with communication capability via analog telephone modems]. At this time in the mid-1980s it was very difficult to travel to the West, and I appreciated it as a young university graduate.” He was also able to spend time researching computer networks in Denmark in 1988, finishing his PhD in 1989.

By that time, Gruntorád was already head of the Data Communication and Computer Networking department of the Czech Technical University’s Regional Computing Centre (URCC). “We were always trying to get access to the latest modem technologies. It was difficult to buy programs and components from abroad, and we needed to buy them with hard currency, which was also difficult to obtain. That’s why I went to study in Denmark in 1988, and the process to go there was difficult. But I could get access to the latest technology there.”

At a Copenhagen conference, Gruntorád came across what we today would recognize as the Internet for the first time. He says he was surprised to see attendees typing on terminals and discovered that they were sending emails. When he asked conference organizers if he could get an email address, he was told there was no point. Back in Czechoslovakia, he wouldn’t be able to use this new technology to contact anyone.

“After my return to Prague, I convinced the university to write to EARN [European Academic and Research Network] asking for a connection for our mainframe. We received a polite answer telling us unfortunately it was not possible to connect to our computers because of political regulations.”

Less than a year later in November 1989, the Iron Curtain fell. By early 1990, Gruntorád became Czech national director of (EARN), responsible for setting up the connected network in Czechoslovakia. Their goal to establish a handshake between the Czech Technical University’s mainframe computer and a university in Linz, Austria via the Internet was achieved in December 1991. On February 13, 1992 he organized the official opening of Internet services in Czechoslovakia. The rest, as they say, is history.

Today, thirty years after his country gained Internet access, Gruntorád reflects on the evolution of this innovative technology that has changed the world.

“I could never imagine when we were connecting academic mainframe computers that we would have computers at home. Back then the speed was so slow, the main services on the Internet were emails, and that was very limited. There was little local content and what was there was mostly in English and from the United States. We only thought about it as a service for researchers and scientists. There was no multi-media, no pictures or video. It was difficult to imagine that people could or would use these facilities from home.”

As to the future of what he called “the free-wheeling Internet,” in his Internet Hall of Fame acceptance video, he’s both excited and cautious. “The Internet is such an open structure where everyone can come, everyone has proposals, and the best technology is chosen by democratic process with no politics behind it. Engineers are very pragmatic, they want the best proposal accepted, regardless of which country it comes from. That is really what moves the Internet forward.

“Even now, the largest volume of communication via CESNET is between scientific instruments – the Internet of Things. This big data needs processing and storage. This phenomenon of machine-to-machine communication – some people criticize it and think the Internet should be primarily for humans. But in the future, I see a combination of both, because the Internet is so flexible that it can manage both kinds of traffic. We still have many problems to face – security, cyberattacks, etc. Work needs to be put in that area to make the Internet safe. The original designers of the Internet did not think of such problems as spam or cyberattacks. This is the challenge so that the Internet is still safe for communication between both humans and machines.”

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Jan Gruntorád

Preserving Privacy on the Internet: Kenneth J. Klingenstein

mingram — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 19:56:10 +0000

Kenneth J. Klingenstein’s lengthy career and his influence on the development of the Internet have been marked by two characteristics: a desire to make the world a better place by expanding the Internet and a drive to protect the privacy and identity of its users.

“I wound up having two great rides,” Klingenstein says of his career. His initial work involved leading the growth of the Internet in the Western United States. As he undertook that work and evangelized its significance to others, the importance of Internet privacy and security became a compelling point that refocused the second half of his work’s trajectory. In both areas, Klingenstein concentrated on what he saw as the projects most likely to make a beneficial impact. “If you want to connect the dots,” he says, “the theme was making a difference.”

In the late 1970s, the young man who’d grown up in New Jersey from a background he declares unremarkable (“Jersey was a very uninspiring place at that time.”), completed his PhD in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1985, Klingenstein took an academic position at the University of Colorado. But his teaching career didn’t exactly blossom. “I didn’t do particularly well as a researcher or a faculty member,” he says. “I was treading water until I switched over to the management side.”

At first, Klingenstein managed the computer center at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. This was in the early days of TCP/IP, the standard protocol allowing computers to connect over long distances. Teaching an early networking class gave him the technical background and insights into the potential of networks that most people involved in computing still didn’t have at that time.

“But all that stuff didn’t really stir me,” he says. Until, that is, he began to show the technology to people who were less technically inclined than he. He recalls demonstrating the power of an academic network to his boss, a psychology professor. “We’re not really connected to a place in Germany,” she said. Said Klingenstein, “Yes, we really are.”

During the nearly decade and a half that Klingenstein helped deploy Internet services throughout the West, he worked closely with the National Science Foundation (NSF). He participated in the initial NSF meetings focused on launching NSFNET, the network that connected research and educational institutions across the United States. He also held leadership positions in Westnet, the original NSF network serving Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, helping ensure largely rural regions were not left behind in Internet development. Klingenstein also led through the NSF-funded clearinghouse that tracked the Internet’s information infrastructure, the Federation of American Research Networks (FARnet).

In the technologically advanced town of Boulder, Klingenstein saw an opportunity to bring the area’s K-12 school district online with the first NSF grant ever awarded to wire a school district. Having established that, he sought a similar grant from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to create the Boulder Community Network, the second www-based community network site in the world.

Of his participation in the work of bringing the West online, Klingenstein modestly says, “I was one of 500 who were ‘in the room.’” But of his work around privacy on the Internet he says, “I was one of more like ten people.”

His interest in privacy dated back to that earlier moment when he connected his boss’s computer to a computer in Germany. As a psychology professor, she was more interested in people than technology. But as she and Klingenstein sat in her office one snowy Colorado afternoon, they moved from a Germany-based site to a Cornell University site that provided anonymous support to students experiencing emotional distress. Called Uncle Ezra, the site allowed students access to informal advice and counseling, provided by an anonymous school therapist. Posted to Uncle Ezra at this particular moment was a note from a student in deep distress; specifically, it detailed their intention to commit suicide. The therapist behind Uncle Ezra had replied with earnestness, comfort, and advice, altering the desperate student’s plans. And it had all been anonymous.

That encounter demonstrated the value of the burgeoning Internet to Klingenstein’s humanist boss, and, to both of them, the value of the network’s privacy and anonymity. Few people would share a suicide note if they had to give identity, Klingenstein realized. “It was a transformational moment,” he recalls.

From that snowy day in 1985, even though Klingenstein continued for several years to work with pure technology and the policies that would manage the Internet, “The idea that we could do all this while preserving privacy was foremost in my mind,” he says.

In the late 1990s, Klingenstein turned his focus full force to envisioning and developing the Internet’s trust and identity layers. Klingenstein approached the problem with the belief that if Internet users surrendered privacy, “... you’d never get it back.” He was looking for a way to authenticate locally but act globally. The solution proved to be privacy preserving by allowing characteristics other than identity to facilitate access–for example that a user was a student but not which exact student.

Serving as the director of the Internet2 Middleware and Security Initiative, Klingenstein led the development and dissemination of middleware interoperability and set best practices in place. “We got involved with the federal government early on in their efforts to create Internet identity,” he says. The government’s philosophy was to build a “‘we-really-know-who-you-are’” system, says Klingenstein. His intention was to develop technology that could create identity, “But we’re going to begin with an anonymous approach.”

It was complicated work. “There was no real advocacy against privacy,” he says of convincing others of privacy’s importance. “But there was advocacy against the complexity that preserving it led to.”

As he dove deeper into trust and identity issues, Klingenstein and colleague Bob Morgan founded the Shibboleth Identity Management System, which became an internationally adopted standard for preserving identity. The Shibboleth name drew from an Old Testament reference tied to the correct pronunciation of a term that could be said a certain way by tribespeople and used to determine who could safely enter the community without additional credentials or identification. Klingenstein notes that the original use of the word Shibboleth was perhaps the first known biometric authentication system.

“We picked the word Shibboleth specifically to capture the fact that this was a privacy-preserving set of technologies that could carry characteristics about who you were without personally identifying you,” he says. Other internationally adopted standards Klingenstein helped launch included the InCommon Federation, which provides secure, single sign-on access to cloud and local services; and the eduPerson object-class standard to facilitate communication between institutes of higher learning.

In working on the trust and identity layer of the Internet, Klingenstein found it extremely useful to follow the design principles of the original network layer, such as modularity, a layered approach and even rules of being cautious in sending parameters and generous in receiving them. "In some sense,” he says, “the design principles of the Internet are as valuable as the technologies they have created."

Indeed, the technology that maintains privacy on the Internet today is largely shaped by Klingenstein’s work. Usually humble and one to generously share credit, he admits to being, “consequential in privacy-preserving.” Where did the drive for that world-changing work come from? “I was a young’un when John Kennedy was killed,” he remarks. “And for everyone who was young at that time, that was a turning point. At that moment, you began to think, ‘How do I contribute back?’”

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Kenneth Klingenstein

A Life-long Love for Computation and Communications: Liane Tarouco

mingram — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 16:22:29 +0000

By Dan Rosenheim

Ask Liane Tarouco what she likes to do besides work, and she doesn’t miss a beat.

“Work is what I like,” she says with a smile. “It is not really work for me. It is a pleasure to study, to discover new things.”

Studying, discovering and teaching new things are what Tarouco has consistently done during a long and distinguished career that has brought her admission to the Internet Hall of Fame.

From her initial book – the first text on computer networks to be published in her native Brazil and still regarded as a kind of Bible there – to her research, teaching and consulting throughout South and Central America, Europe, Africa and Asia, Tarouco has been among the very top contributors to Internet development.

“Since the beginning, when I started to see what could be done with networking, I dreamt of having a network that involves us all and could help us make better decisions in every aspect of our lives,” she said. “And that is becoming a reality more and more.”

While Tarouco’s stellar career has been international in scope, her origins are more provincial.

She spent her early childhood in the south Brazilian town of Cerro Largo, “a really, really small place at the time,” Tarouco said, and the family then moved several times to other small towns before settling in the regional capital of Porto Alegre.

Her father was a tax auditor for the federal government, and her mother was a seamstress, working, as Tarouco puts it, “on Singer dresses.”

“She made clothes for sale and for the family, beautiful clothes,” Tarouco said.

There were five daughters – four of whom survived into adulthood – and Liane was the star pupil among them. Foreshadowing her future as an academic, she took her studies seriously from the start, mindful of her parents’ admonition to “study first, play after.”

“This was not a problem for me,” she said, “because I liked to study.”

While a conscientious daughter, Tarouco also displayed a strong independent streak, a trait that, she says, she retains to this day.

Sent to school at the age of 3, for example, Tarouco wanted instead to be at home with her younger sister. So she ran away.

“The nuns woke up and said, ‘Where is Liane? Where is Liane?” she said. “I was walking far away, trying to find my way home.

“I was not the kind of person who constantly said, ‘I want this, I want that,’” she added. “But when I really wanted to do something, I did it.”

School may have held little appeal for the three-year-old, but within a few more years it became clear that Tarouco was an eager and gifted student, with a special affinity for mathematics.

“I just liked it,” she said. “I liked that it was a challenge, but I also found it easy to learn.”

Nor did it hurt that her parents valued learning.

“My father was always watching for my school results, always keeping an eye on my studies,” Tarouco said. “And when we moved from city to city, we always looked for a house located near a good school. My parents always said that education was a very important thing.”

By the time she was ready for college. Tarouco’s interest had evolved from math into physics.

“Science was something that made my eyes bright in high school,” she said. “I was attracted to physics because I liked to fix things, like motor cars, and I liked to do experiments in the laboratory. I saw NASA was doing big things, and my dream was to work in NASA.”

Planning to major in physics, Tarouco enrolled in Brazil’s premier state-run university, the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre. The physics classes there proved disappointing – they were, she says, more theoretical and less hands-on than she had imagined. But her life changed in 1968, during her second year at the school, when she was asked to join a course on programming.

“As soon as I got in that course I said, ‘This is what I want to do,’” she said. “I was in love with computation. It changed my life.”

Initially, Tarouco used that newfound love to help her physics professors create computer programs. Then, as she advanced through graduate school to get her MSc and PhD, she began to teach computing at the university.

And beginning in the early 1970s, she turned her talents toward computer connectivity – influenced initially by a class taught in Brazil by Internet pioneer (and fellow Hall of Famer) Leonard Kleinrock, the UCLA professor who had established the ARPANET by sending the first transmission packet between UCLA and Stanford.

Tarouco’s burgeoning interest in connectivity soon got a local application. The federal university had purchased a mainframe computer so large that it had to be installed on another campus two miles away.

“It was batch computing, but with no network,” she said.

Through a process of trial-and-error, Tarouco and her colleagues succeeded in connecting the remote site to the main campus and in so doing designed the first modem in Brazil.

Buoyed by that early success, Tarouco helped draft an initial scheme for connecting computers throughout the Brazilian university system. The project developed gradually through the 1980s and 90s, hobbled by the need for funding and the phone company’s monopoly on transmission, but it was finally realized with support from the National Science Foundation. Continuing to develop computer networks throughout the country, Tarouco was instrumental in the creation of Brazil’s Internet “backbone,” the National Research Network, 1992.

She was also chairman and worked in the implementation of the state network (TCHE network in Rio Grande do Sul) in 1993 and in the metropolitan area network (METROPOA) begun in Porto Alegre in 1999. Both were academic networks allowing access to universities in the region.

Meanwhile, her seminal textbook "Redes de Comunicacao de Dados (Data Communications Networks)", published in Portuguese in 1977, was used to educate a whole generation of computer students in Brazil.

While Tarouco has spent much of her life at the university, teaching and researching, she has also traveled widely to provide training and to speak at conferences in the U.S., Central and South America, Portugal and Mozambique. In 1983 she was Brazil’s representative to the International Federation for Information Processing – Technical Committee in Data Communication (IFIP-TC6). And for a time she also ran a consulting company to help banks and other large companies with computing.

Tarouco’s love of computing is actually rivaled by her devotion to family. She met her husband, a teleprocessing technician, when the two worked on IBM tabulating machines in a data processing center in 1969. Together they have a daughter, working in the field of graphic design.

Liane Tarouco programming next to her future husband, 1969. Image courtesy of Liane Tarouco.

And for Tarouco, family ties go far, far beyond the immediate household.

As with many Brazilians, Tarouco’s roots are in Europe – but in her case, they lie in

Germany, not Portugal. (Tarouco’s maiden name was Rockenbach, and her mother’s surname was Dillenburg). In 1829, Tarouco’s great great grandfather emigrated from what was then Prussia. Some years later, three other family members also emigrated to the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Despite that ancestry, Tarouco grew up speaking Portuguese, not German.

“I was born after the war,” she said, “and my mother was quite scared because of the persecution that happened during the Second World War to Germans. They were forbidden to speak in German. They couldn't have books in German. So my mother didn't teach me.”

Language aside, the family in Brazil has held on to its common ancestry, even as it has grown exponentially.

Today, said Tarouco, who acts as the family’s webmaster, the descendants of those initial four number 19,000 in Brazil. Hundreds of them come to a family reunion each year, where a Catholic mass is followed by an enormous barbecue and dancing.

In her spare time, Tarouco also loves to travel – to the mountains in Brazil, and in America to Las Vegas (“not for gambling, but for lights and fountains”), Orlando, Miami and Denver (“at the top of the mountains, you see snow, which is nice because we don’t have snow”).

Meanwhile, with 50 years at the university and a career that effectively spans the history of digital communications, Tarouco still teaches a full course load and publishes a dozen articles a year. In her career, she has published seven books and delivered several hundred papers. And she hasn’t stopped researching and learning.

“I like to grow, so I'm now investigating metaverses and creating virtual laboratories for teaching science,” said Tarouco, who is using MIT’s SCRATCH animation program to help young students conduct experiments.

And if she has any ambivalence about the current controversies surrounding cyberspace, it’s not readily apparent.

“The Internet is a good thing,” she says flatly. “Whether it’s shopping or travel or even health, the Internet gives us the information we need to make good decisions.”

To be sure, Tarouco will acknowledge that the Internet’s growth poses problems of privacy and security.

“I know there is disinformation, and security issues can be a bit scary,” she said. “We have to be cautious about what we do.

“But it's a burden we have to deal with,” she adds, “to teach the kids to see the emotional and physical traps and avoid them. And that was also true before there was an Internet.”

Ultimately, Tarouco said, it falls to the individual to avoid the web’s pitfalls.

“I can exercise my filtering to decide what is misinformation, what is true, what is half true,” she said. “Just like when I was a kid, I don’t accept someone else making decisions for me. I can make them myself.”

Dan Rosenheim was managing editor of The San Francisco Chronicle and vice president/news for KPIX-TV. Retired from full-time work, he is currently business development director for Bay City News and LocalNewsMatters.org.

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Liane Tarouco

Increasing Growth, Speed, Coverage and Reliability: Hans-Werner Braun and the Development of the NSFNET

mingram — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 19:35:14 +0000

“I was never very good at sitting in class and listening to some person talk about what I should learn,” says Hans-Werner Braun. Instead, the engineer who was a driving force behind building the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET), the precursor to the modern Internet, was a hands-on learner, tinkering with model trains and electronic kits as a child in Germany.

That need to do, to take an idea and apply it in a concrete fashion, has been fundamental to Braun’s contributions to the Internet. You can see it in the work he undertook through an informal collaboration between the six NSF supercomputer sites to bring the original interim 56 kilobits-per-second NSFNET backbone network to an operational state. The commitment to being hands-on is also apparent in the work that followed when that collaboration became formalized, to replace, in a matter of months, the backbone then running at 1.544 Mbps (T1). It’s evident in the years Braun spent analyzing network performance and traffic analysis as well as in his project through the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN) to build the remote, unattended wireless network that today connects scientific instruments, Native American reservations, and federal, state, and local firefighting assets in Southern California. Asked if he considers himself a visionary, Braun muses, “Maybe I’m better at making things work by engineering solutions, if someone presents me with a problem statement.”

Despite wanting more than to sit in class, Braun had a career involving several institutes of higher learning. He obtained a college degree at the engineering school in Bielefeld, at a time when punchcards and paper-tapes were still high-tech. After graduation in 1973, his first job was with the regional computing center at the University of Cologne (RRZK), where he was responsible for running its Northrhine-Westphalia-wide inter-university network.

When Eric Aupperle at the University of Michigan hired him in 1983, Braun, his wife and two children moved to Ann Arbor where he began working with the Michigan Educational Research Triad (MERIT) team, a multi-university infrastructure project of which Aupperle was president.

While Braun's initial responsibilities included supporting the development of MERIT's interuniversity network in Michigan, which ran its own protocols and network operating system on the routers, he soon became interested in the Internet protocol suite. David Mills, creator of the Fuzzball router operating system and original author of the Network Time Protocol (NTP), then working at Linkabit, was of substantial help. With Mills’ support and expertise, Braun set up a few machines running the Fuzzball OS on DEC LSI-11 minicomputers at the University of Michigan. With the technical support of the Ford Motor Company and Linkabit, this effort enabled connecting the University to the ARPAnet.

The ARPAnet connection meant substantial progress towards larger connectivity, but implementing the 56 kbps NSFNET was still a challenge, especially through the informal arrangement between institutions. In particular, while Braun was surrounded by partners who understood the components of the massively expanded network they hoped to develop, it was very difficult to find like-minded doers with whom to discuss system-level issues.

This all changed when the combined teams at the University of Michigan, IBM and MCI were awarded the 1987 NSF grant formalizing the commitment to creating a T1 NSFNET. The grant, for which Braun was co-principal investigator and Aupperle principal investigator and program director, increased the number of human resources dedicated to project management and network operations at the University of Michigan. Additional resources also included Braun's Internet Engineering team, as well as network packet-switch development and integration teams and technology from IBM, and the provisioning of the then rather unusual high-speed circuits by MCI. The newly unified teams collaborated with 13 NSFNET-affiliated regional network sites as well as government agencies.

The grant was timely, as the 56 kbps NSFNET was in such demand that it became clogged with network traffic. With users clamoring for the service, the agreement with the NSF specified an ambitious deadline of July 1, 1988. These were lofty goals, often touted as unachievable by some vocal members of the Internet community, but the team pulled through right on time. When the upgrade was complete, around 8 PM on June 30, 1988, Braun emailed NSF and the Regional Network users, “The NSFNET Backbone has reached a state where we would like to more officially let operational traffic on." According to the NSF, this understated message essentially "announced the birth of the modern Internet."

Beyond the T1 upgrade, Braun continued to help make NSFNET faster. By 1990, the team had developed a prototype network that ran at a T3 level of 45Mbps between Ann Arbor and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego. In 1991, Braun and his family relocated to San Diego where he continued his work with SDSC. When it became clear that NSFNET would be decommissioned, in the mid-1990s, Braun played a central role in conceptualizing the follow-on architecture for NSF to support academic institutions.

For several years at SDSC, Braun also managed research activities on network performance, traffic analysis and network workloads, initially with a local team, then, while creating the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR), at a national level. Eventually this resulted in an international collaboration, with NLANR locating a significant number of active and passive network measurement nodes in countries around the globe.

The builder’s mindset that had tinkered with electric systems and model trains in his youth continued to find an outlet in applications for technology, always with a novel approach to connecting.

In Seattle for about a year, starting in 1996, Braun served briefly as chief network architect of the ambitious Teledesic project which sought to provide commercial broadband network access via hundreds of low-Earth-orbiting satellites. Apparently, those objectives were about 25 years ahead of their time. Returning to San Diego, he continued NLANR work on measurement and analysis, using packet-tracing to examine what kinds of network traffic were used the most to determine what kinds of future requirements will be placed on network implementations.

In 2000, Braun started the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN). The idea for the organization came about when UCSD/Scripps Institute of Oceanography seismologist Frank Vernon presented Braun with a problem statement: Could the earthquake sensors he managed in the California desert and elsewhere be converted to TCP/IP? They were subsequently awarded an NSF grant to address the project, with Braun as principal investigator and Vernon as co-principal. The network evolved quickly, with objectives well beyond Vernon's earthquake sensors, and included interdisciplinary and multi-institutional collaborations with researchers and educators in astronomy, biology, geophysics, computer network areas, as well as collaboration with Native Americans and First Responders. This created an interesting network workload. At one extreme are the many earthquake-monitoring stations in Southern California, which track ongoing information about the Earth’s movements and send it to a centralized server. “It’s a very low traffic volume per sensor, but it’s continuous, twenty-four hours a day,” Braun notes. The Palomar Observatory represents the other end of the spectrum of network load. An astrological research center the childhood Braun had revered, the Observatory generates enormous amounts of information in the form of images from outer space, but sends them in relatively short bursts when a new image is available.

HPWREN’s aim also included establishing links to multiple scientific instruments and locations, all with varying needs and workloads, throughout Southern California. Braun pioneered this project by leading the development of a network of remote wireless connections, essentially an “Internet of things” before the term existed. In addition to continuing to monitor the Earth’s and stars’ movements, the project continues to provide visibility over a large range of terrain, including information useful to firefighters and other public safety officials.

“There were other things that were amazing,” says Braun about his Southern California career. Among these amazing activities was the work Braun and his team did with tribal organizations, initially on the Pala, La Jolla, and Rincon Native American Reservations. Settled in a landscape of mile-high peaks and deep valleys, the Reservation seemed an unlikely place to locate a reliable, secure network. From their first meeting, Braun encouraged the tribal partners to work towards a self-contained, tribal-owned network system, something that he intended to launch while training them. "This worked out very well," Braun says with pride. “It’s theirs. They know how to do this thing now.” The Tribal Digital Village Network (TDVnet) expanded from the initial three HPWREN-connected tribes to encompass 17 tribes via network sites often in isolated locations with no access to outside electricity, some running on their own solar systems. In a twist Braun finds pleasing, many years after he had launched the project, HPWREN needed place a microwave tower relay site on remote lands in order to reach one of the San Diego State University field stations. TDVnet provided access on their tribal lands as well as the electricity to power the tower.

Most of the systems that Braun helped build have expanded to much larger, more independent existences than the man who helped make them had foreseen. He laughs at himself, “When people started to make search engines, I thought, ‘There are only so many Internet sites. What do you need a search engine for?’” Braun’s tactical drive continues to keep him fascinated and engaged with active projects even in semi-retirement as a Research Scientist Emeritus at UCSD. “If you don’t do something,” he says, “you wither and die.” It’s that focus that we owe a debt to, to no small degree, for the Internet we know today. Recalling his early days shepherding the creation of the system that would become the Internet, Braun acknowledges his own tight attention to the work at hand. “I don’t think I was close to imagining the shape it would take.”

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Hans-Werner Braun

The Magic Box and the Spanning Tree: Radia Perlman Profiled in Hidden Heroes Series

mingram — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 16:49:41 +0000

Radia Perlman is considered by many to be one of the most critical individuals in the development of certain network protocols and algorithms that still support how the Internet we know today functions.

In a recent in-depth profile on the life and career of Perlman (2014 Internet Hall of Fame inductee), Steven Johnson follows her career with steps along the way including her perseverance as the sole woman in her freshman undergraduate class at MIT to her development of the spanning tree protocol and her influence on younger professionals through her well-known 1992 textbook, Interconnections.

As the author notes, “We tend to focus on the glittery applications that we interact with directly—TikTok and Chrome and Spotify—but all those apps would be worthless without the quiet miracle of stable network architecture, seamlessly connecting servers and routers all around the world. That architecture was the product of many minds, each contributing small pieces to the puzzle that over time has given us the network stability that the entire world depends on. Radia Perlman contributed more than her fair share of those pieces over her long career—and probably did as much as anyone to explain how stable networks worked, teaching a whole generation of network designers in her wake.”

Read the full article

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Radia Perlman

The Future of the Metaverse in Daily Life

mingram — Fri, 01 Jul 2022 19:08:12 +0000

Vint Cerf, David Clark, and Henning Schulzrinne among those surveyed for study on the future of the metaverse.

The metaverse can be understood as a blended virtual and physical space of computer-generated, networked extended reality, augmented reality, as well as mixed and virtual reality (AR, MR and VR).

The term and its associated technologies have become more visible largely due to a corporate rebrand of the social media platform Facebook to Meta in 2021.

But, what makes up the metaverse? How does the Internet fuel its progress? And, how do people see its role in society evolving? With rising public interest in these questions, Pew Research Center, in collaboration with the Elon Imagining the Internet Center, conducted a wide-reaching survey of over 600 experts in the spring of 2022 asking participants about where extended reality tools that make the metaverse possible and the trends seen today may take us by 2040.

The survey included familiar public figures and technology experts as well as professors, futurists, and members of the public. IHOF inductees Vint Cerf, David Clark, and Henning Schulzrinne were among those surveyed.

Clark, an IHOF 2013 inductee and senior research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, made an ideal candidate for the study since his career has largely been dedicated to exploring the potentialities of the Internet.

As he told IHOF in 2017, “It takes a long time to make changes, so someone has to think ahead.”

The 200 page Metaverse in 2040 report highlights the thoughts of many of those surveyed and clearly suggests that participants believe augmented-reality and mixed-reality tools will play a greater role in people’s daily lives by 2040.

Another clear message from the survey is that this imagined future may underscore both positives and negatives in human nature. As the report notes, mixed-reality experiences have the possibility of “magnifying every human trait and tendency – both the bad and the good. [Respondents to the survey] especially focused their concerns on the ability of those in control of these systems to redirect, restrain or thwart human agency and stifle people’s ability to self actualize through exercise of free will.”

When discussing how the metaverse might function in the future, Clark notes, “I think the three critical considerations are: Where the standards will come from? How open will the system be? Who controls it? My uncertainty about the metaverse is not whether we will have ‘something’ by 2040, but what character it will have.” He adds, “Between now and 2040 we have the time to try and perhaps fail several times.”

Explore the reflections from Clark, Cerf, Schulzrinne and more, in the full survey report.

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David Clark

Vinton Cert

Vint Cerf

Henning Schulzrinne

Connecting Communities Through Technology: Carlos Afonso

mingram — Tue, 24 May 2022 18:50:55 +0000

At age 13, Carlos Afonso, growing up near the banks of the Parana River in Brazil, discovered a knack for fixing radios. It was an inherited skill he attributes to his Italian grandfather, who he remembers could fix just about any machine.

It wasn't long before Carlos and some friends leveraged these skills to launch a clandestine radio station. "We broadcast music and talk programs and were able to reach neighboring cities." It was a brief endeavor, but one that started Afonso on a life-long path supporting a belief that everyone deserves equal access to the tools of communication.

In 1964 Afonso began attending the University of São Paulo. His parents were of modest means, but he notes, "my mother managed to gather enough resources so I could study naval engineering.” While there, he had his first encounter with computers – the early punch-card variety.

In Afonso’s first years at the university, the Brazilian military took power in Brazil and established a dictatorship hostile to new ideas and democracy itself. Unlike many of his peers, Afonso, whose studies were supported by the Navy, was allowed to continue attending. He remembers a Navy official telling him, “It is impossible that a good student like you has a passion for resisting the government!” That official, it seems, wasn’t aware of Afonso’s passion for democratic values and his commitment to the progressive student movement. As restrictions for students grew, his last year of study became peppered with subtle acts of resistance. He recalls instances of slipping onto campus while avoiding the detection of military fractions.

As the military government became increasingly radical, even the protection of the Navy was not enough. In 1970, Afonso left Brazil and arrived in Chile as a refugee, landing just months before Salvador Allende was elected president. There Afonso met Cleyde, another Brazilian political refugee, who became his wife. The Allende government was forward-thinking in its use of computing, and Afonso was recruited to work in the national planning office for several years before a right-wing military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet toppled the government.

Again, Afonso and his now pregnant wife were forced to find a new home, and they took refuge in the Panamanian embassy in Santiago. With the help of the Swedish ambassador, the embassy refugees managed to travel to Panama, where their son Rodrigo was born.

The country could have remained their home but during negotiations over the status of the Panama Canal, U. S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger demanded Chilean refugees be expelled from the country. The young family finally found a home in Canada. Cleyde helped create and co-ordinated an immigrant women’s support center in Toronto but Afonso’s work remained focused on the importance of connection, especially throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

Once in Toronto, Afonso’s fascination with educational access truly bloomed. He remembers the first time he was able to check out books as a graduate student in Toronto through academic networks connected to the United States. Reflecting on the new level of access he felt, he remembers thinking, “This is the future, one I hope to someday help bring back to Brazil.” While in Toronto, he worked as a social projects analyst for the United Church of Canada and co-founded, with other Brazilian refugees, a research and information project called “Brazilian Studies.” After a few years, the family received Canadian citizenship.

With the stringency of the Brazilian military dictatorship diminishing as a result of a political amnesty, Afonso returned to Brazil in 1980 and settled in Rio de Janeiro with his family. “We returned to Brazil and brought an Apple II computer, a restricted import at the time,” he says. “We started to use that little computer to develop information services for civil society organizations.”

As a result of his experience and work in Canada, Afonso proposed and co-founded with other returning refugees the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analyses, known as Ibase. Launched in 1981, Ibase was to be an active citizenship organization focused on transformative democratic actions, under the motto “democratize information to democratize society”. Through Ibase, Afonso conceived of and led what would become the first Internet service provider in Brazil.

In 1984, Afonso and colleagues started connecting non-governmental organizations in Latin America and other nations, partly with support from the International Development Research Center (IDRC), a Canadian governmental organization that funds development projects around the world. “They were very interested in helping with connectivity of NGOs through email or messaging using the packet-switching networks that several countries had at the time,” he says.

Inspired by the idea of using packet-switching networks to make broad connections and armed with the support of organizations like IDRC, in 1989, Afonso and others launched Alternex, Brazil’s first free networking service for civil society organizations and private individuals. In May 1990, networks in Sweden (NordNet), Canada (Web), Brazil (Ibase), Nicaragua (Nicarao), Australia (Pegasus), IGC (US) and GreenNet (UK) founded the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) to coordinate the operation and development of this emerging global network of networks.

Alternex caught the rest of the world’s attention in 1992, when Afonso, with support from the APC network and the nascent National Education and Research Network (RNP), proposed and successfully deployed Internet-connected centers at a global United Nations conference in Brazil, the first use of the Internet at a UN event. Equipment was donated through support from the Canadian government and Sun Microsystems, with logistical support from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). This required overcoming a number of legal hurdles, since the state controlled all telecommunications and considered TCP/IP networks illegal. “The national telecommunications monopoly didn’t want anything to do with having Internet in the conference,” remarks Afonso. Having navigated restrictions and regulations throughout his career, Afonso cleverly inserted a clause in the conference’s host-country agreement that the hosting government was required to supply Internet links, thus overcoming a major regulatory hurdle. Since then, the links which were supposed to be temporary have become permanent.

Afonso went on to play a quiet, steady, and ultimately major role in the dissemination of the Internet and its services throughout Brazil. From his experience working with NGOs and through Ibase, he collaborated with other global Internet groups to form the APC, which focuses on making new communications techniques available to movements working for social change. He and his RNP colleagues were instrumental in bringing together academic and governmental sectors to form a multi-stakeholder board for the Brazilian Internet, dissociating the Internet layers from telecommunication regulations. He helped establish hundreds of Brazilian Internet telecenters, locations throughout the country where anyone could have free Internet access. He helped bring Internet services powered by solar panels to riverbank villages along the Amazon, and he co-founded Instituto Nupef, which works on deploying community networks in the Amazon and is a player in the Internet governance arena.

“Everything I’m telling you, I did not do alone,” says Afonso. But through his collaborative approach and ongoing leadership in the field, Brazil has a thriving Internet culture, one that connects even its most remote and under-resourced residents to each other and the rest of the world. He notes, “There is still a lot to be done for the country to achieve full digital inclusion.”

Reflecting back he laughs as he notes, “To think, this all started by fixing radios when I was 13 years old.”

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Carlos Afonso

From Aberdeen to Bhutan: Early Interest in How Things Work Takes Philip Smith to Internet Fame

mingram — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 19:47:45 +0000

By Dan Rosenheim

Sandwiched between China and northern India, and just east of Nepal, the kingdom of Bhutan historically ranked among the world’s most insular states, largely free from international communications – and even outside visitors.

But the 21st century has swept change into the small mountain nation, bringing cars, highrises, sprawl and, perhaps most significantly, the Internet.

And no person contributed more to the web’s development in Bhutan than Philip Smith, a native-born Scot who has spent much of his professional career helping strengthen and connect Internet service in less-developed parts of the world.

Smith has brought his special expertise in connecting networks to many Asian Pacific nations, as well as to parts of Africa and the Middle East, and that work in turn has brought Smith admission to the Internet Hall of Fame.

For Smith, the Internet’s great importance lies in the economic development possibilities it brings – the chance to improve the quality of people’s lives.

“I don’t really care if someone wants to get access to YouTube,” he said during an interview. “What I consider important is that the economy flows to make things better for local people.”

He cites by way of an esoteric, yet meaningful, example a medicinal parasite known as the caterpillar fungus, or cordyceps, which grows in the high Himalaya of northern Bhutan.

“The Chinese can’t get enough of it,” Smith said, “and the Bhutanese nomadic herders can now bring it down to the villages and sell it to the Chinese on the Internet.

“It gives them an economic opportunity they never ever had. I see it as bringing benefit to them, to the folks around them and to the local economy.”

Digitally marketed caterpillar fungi in Bhutan are a long way from Smith’s childhood on a farm near the tiny village of Monymusk, 20 miles from Aberdeen in the north east of Scotland.

There, Smith’s parents were tenant farmers, growing barley, potatoes, turnips, and raising cattle on the same land worked earlier by his grandparents and great grandparents.

Even as a young boy, though, Smith showed less interest in agriculture than in how things work.

“I was always taking things apart – there are pictures of me doing it as a little child,” he said. “Mum always complained: ‘Philip takes things apart to see how they work but never quite gets them back together.’

“You know, it’s just interesting” Smith continued. “With the farm machinery, of course, it was a classic place to explore: how does this all work and how can it be made to work better? That kind of thing just suited my mind somehow.”

Interesting agricultural equipment notwithstanding, Smith’s parents were insistent that he and his siblings not become farmers.

“They saw there was no future in it,” he said. “It just kept getting harder: the weather, the area, the owner of the estate, the attitudes – it was horrendous.

So after a few years in the village school, where Smith was frustrated by the slow pace of instruction, he was enrolled in a private school in Aberdeen. There he was introduced to more advanced math and to physics, which led eventually to 10 years at Aberdeen University for an undergraduate degree, a PhD and three years of post-doctoral work.

It was a long educational path, but there was no single “aha” moment where his career path became clear.

In private school, when a careers counselor asked Smith what he was going to do, he said: “I don’t know.”

When she asked what interests you: “I don’t know.”

“But (at university) I actually was getting interested in the network thing,” Smith said. “It wasn’t that I thought ‘This Internet is good for the world and will be a fantastic modern communications media.’ It was, again: this is interesting, how it’s all working.”

Connectivity was just developing in those early days of computing.

“I used an HP Unix workstation in my postgraduate days; it had this strange connector on it. During my undergraduate days you were basically sitting at a teletype connected to a mainframe somewhere. If you were lucky, you had a black-and-white screen with 18-by-25 characters, and that was it.”

But this was an embryonic version of Ethernet, and soon IP protocol was coming from the United States, so by the time Smith was a postdoc, it was possible to get the Internet on the university’s old network..

“A couple of friends in the computing center started playing with it, and it was like, “‘Ooh, can I get a connection in my building?’” Smith said. “And that’s kind of where it all started for me, just using these Internet protocols.”

Transforming Smith’s growing interest and abilities into gainful employment took a little doing.

“I'd gone through umpteen job interviews with various companies – you know, you do the 100 applications, get three replies and one interview,” he said.

But having completed his postdoctoral work, Smith saw an online ad from the UK’s first Internet Service Provider, a Cambridge-based company called PIPEX, so he flew down for an interview.

The result initially was disappointing once again. An experienced tech worker had just left a competitor, and he, rather than Smith, was hired to fill the PIPEX opening.

“They’re: ‘We really want to hire you, but we had to do this, so now there’s no opening, but we promise we’ll be in touch and blah, blah blah,’ and I was like, right, same story all over again.”

So Smith took a job running and improving the Aberdeen University Engineering Department’s network – less interesting than the PIPEX opportunity but preferable to becoming a lecturer.

Then, shortly before Christmas and as Smith had begun despairing of ever being offered work in the private sector, he got an email from PIPEX asking him to start in two weeks. And he did.

PIPEX was very much in the forefront of British Internet development – the name is short for Public IP Exchange – although it was occasionally mistaken for a London pipelaying company of the same name.

(“Our poor receptionist would get calls asking for quotes for sewerage,” Smith recalled.)

But name confusion aside, it put Smith on the ground floor of early Internet growth, and he stayed with the company for five years of very rapid expansion. When he joined PIPEX in 1993, it was celebrating its 20th customer; five years later, it had well over 100,000.

“I got there without really understanding what was going on in the Internet world, but they said, ‘Well, we don’t really know either – the Internet is such an early thing,’ so we all just learned as we went and basically built up what’s known as a raft of best practices.”

“It’s sort of like when you buy an appliance,” Smith continued. “You’ve got instructions which tell you which are the dominant buttons, but they don’t tell you the best way to use it – you get that from experience.

“So we had all this equipment, and nobody was really sure the best way to use it, or to build networks – but we went from connecting people at 9600 bits-per-second to eight megabits-per-second five years later.”

Smith’s work at PIPEX became the springboard for a remarkable career.

Next stop was Cisco Systems, a key supplier to PIPEX.

“I was at the IETF meeting in Munich in 1997, and a Cisco consulting engineer asked me to come have some beers with his group – yeah, a few beers, it was Munich, right? His director said, ‘Cisco basically doesn’t really know how its equipment is being used in the ISP industry. It doesn’t know the best practices. It knows how to sell it, how to configure it from a theoretical point of view, but from an actual operational expert point of view, you know how this Internet thing works, how the providers work, how to interconnect between different networks.’ ”

So in 1998 Smith joined Cisco where he helped develop training programs to allow Internet Service Providers to connect with each other efficiently, using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), a routing convention that was being significantly developed at the time.

Cisco wanted Smith in Southeast Asia, where there was a desperate need for better connectedness – as well as a commercial opportunity for equipment sales – and he left the UK for a new home in Australia.

“If you’re in Singapore, and you wanted to connect with the Philippines or Australia, you could use submarine fiber to connect through the U.S.,” Smith said. “But the speed of light is only so fast. You really want the shortest possible path.”

For more than a decade, creating those short paths was Smith’s job at Cisco. He helped document and promote Best Current Practices, and he furthered the use of Internet Exchange Points, a kind of neutral meeting point for different operators within the same country.

“Again, like the BGP example, the idea is that traffic from the customer of one ISP to a website hosted by another ISP doesn’t have to take a world tour,” Smith said. “Simply put, you have a hierarchy of providers – small access providers, regional providers for an area like Southeast Asia, and global providers who appear on every continent. How all these interconnect is really the magic about how the Internet functions.”

If Internet Service Providers were encouraged to connect locally, not so Smith. With substantial support from Cisco, he conducted training sessions throughout the world, above all in Asia and the Pacific, but also in Africa, Europe and even the U.S.

“The U.S. was kind of a strange one because everybody always has this idea that it is the center of the Internet, and here was somebody from Scotland living in Australia come to the US to teach them about stuff that came from Silicon Valley,” Smith said.

But while Smith literally had carte blanche to help make the Internet better, things were changing at Cisco.

Beginning in the early 2000s, the company began pursuing a highly aggressive acquisition strategy, one that Smith feels was less than well conceived.

“It was growth, growth, growth without enough thought about how to integrate the acquisitions,” he said.

After peaking at more than $80 a share in 2000, Cisco’s stock collapsed for the rest of the decade, sitting at a mere $12 a share in late 2008. That year, the company brought in a new chief technology officer, and Smith’s travel budget abruptly evaporated.

“The CTO said, ‘No, we don’t do this anymore. AT&T runs the Internet, and we don’t need to be involved,’ ” Smith said. “It was just a losing game for me.”

So in 2011 Smith left Cisco to work for the Internet address registry, APNIC, where he spent roughly three years continuing to help with Internet infrastructure development in the Asia Pacific Region.

And then, because the APNIC job involved more management than he’d bargained for, he left to form his own business, PFS Internet Development, where he works today. One major client: Network Startup Resource Center, a nonprofit funded by the NSF and other donors that works to improve global Internet infrastructure. NSRC was begun by Randy Bush and run since the mid-90s by Steve Huter, and both men are also Internet Hall of Fame members.

Today, Smith runs his business from his Australian hometown of Brisbane. He has become an Australian citizen with no immediate plans to return to Scotland, other than visits to see his mother.

Outside of work, Smith swims, cycles and reads; he’s partial to the Scottish detective author Ian Rankin. He also plays piano, although, perhaps unsurprisingly, sitting in front of a keyboard has limited recreational appeal.

Asked to name the part of his career in which he takes the most pride, he answers without hesitation: Bhutan.

His first visit was in 1999 to set up Internet service for the Fourth King’s Silver Jubilee, and he’s since gone back 21 times.

“It’s the longest relationship I’ve had with any country, and it continues – from setting up the Internet there in 1999, working with Bhutan Telecom, the move to other providers, and now helping build a Research and Education Network.

“It’s just an amazing and a special place.”

And asked to reflect on his swath of accomplishments, Smith paused before mentioning one personal aspect – overcoming a paralyzing fear of public speaking.

“A reason I was so glad to leave the university is that I did not want to teach,” he said. “It’s the last thing I wanted to do – presentations, lectures, talking to people, anything like that. Even defending my PhD was a terrifying experience. I was just hopeless about public speaking. I just couldn’t.

“And, this is the irony: Now I do conference talks in front of thousands of people.”

As for the promise and peril of the Internet, Smith likens it to the highway network for cars and trucks.

“We can build beautiful roads but we can’t always train the drivers. I don’t think we ever intended the web to end up being used in a bad way – the bad stuff’s extremely disappointing.

“But would I do this again? I probably would. Because I can see the benefit of having infrastructure in a lot of places that didn’t have it.

“What I consider important is making things better for local people in general, making things a lot easier.”

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Philip Smith