Posted on August 13, 2011 by Jim Ayson

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.
——-

(As published online on INQ7 on March 26, 2001)

“On Tuesday, March 29, 1994 at 10:18 A.M. at the University
of San Carlos (USC), Talamban, Cebu, the Philippines was
linked to the world via Internet. The occasion was the first
International Email Conference organized by Dr. John D. Brule
of Syracuse University and USC. A cheer went up at the plenary
conference. Cebu was again the point of contact with the world
as it was in 1521.”
— Dr. Rodolfo Villarica of PH.NET, from a speech at the
Baguio Convention of the Philippine Institute of Chemical
Engineers, February 17, 1995
It seems there’s always a public side to history, and a private one. This week,
we’re celebrating the historic link up of the Philippines to the Internet through the
Philnet project, a collaboration of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST)
and the academic community. It’s convenient we can even pin an exact time and date
to the connection, because there were dozens of folks attending a conference to
hear Dr. John Brule saying the simple words, “We’re in” to announce the live
connection. There was much applause and cheering, and if it wasn’t too early in the
day to start drinking, there should have been champagne corks (or more likely, SMB
Pale Pilsen bottles) popping to celebrate. That’s the public side of this event.
But behind every historic public tech spectacle is the quiet story of the techie working
in the background to set things up before the newsreel cameras start rolling. There is a
private side to March 29, 1994, which incredibly enough seems to have been left out
of much of the numerous newspaper and magazine articles describing the events of
that day. Luckily I managed to corner Benjie Tan, the man behind-the-scenes that
day, and persuaded him into letting us know what really went on. This is his story.
Midnight ride to history

The Cisco 7000

In 1994, Benjie Tan was working for a company called ComNet(Computer Network
Systems Corp.), which supplied the Ciscorouters used during the Philnet project. In
those days, TCP/IPnetworks weren’t too common (Novell IPX/SPX networks ruled
the roost) and not too many people even knew what a router was, much less how to
configure it. So Benjie and Comnet president Willy Gan, both of whom later founded
the pioneer Internet service provider MosCom, spent a lot of time guiding the young
technical committee members of Philnet in the fine art of Cisco router configuration
and management. But on that fateful day, all of the Philnet technical crew was down
in Cebu attending a conference, so it was up to Benjie to turn on the switch on
the Cisco 7000 router to connect Philnet to US-based Internet provider Sprint
Communications.
On the evening of March 28, 1994, Benjie flew into Manila back from a business trip
in Hong Kong knowing that the hookup between PLDT (the local leased line
provider) and Sprint was scheduled to take place that night. It was the last flight out of
the then-crown colony. He arrived at the Manila airport at about 11 pm, rushed home
to Makati to drop off his things, and then headed out to the ComNet office in Legaspi
Village, Makati to await further instructions.
Unfortunately, there was no one in the office, but Benjie sees a note pinned on the
wall, written by one of his staff. There’s a checklist of things to do from his boss Gan.
He needs to bring over a Cisco 7000 router from the ComNet office and install it in
PLDT. Now. There’s also a short apology from his staff. “Sorry sir, we can’t be here
to help you because we went home already.” From here on, Benjie is totally on his
own. It is now about 11:30 pm.

One of his instructions was to call up the Sprint people in Stockton, California to give
them notice that the router would be in place soon and the Internet link would soon be
ready to be activated. So Benjie makes the long distance call, introduces himself, and
tells the Sprint guys to be ready in about an hour and a half.

There’s a problem though. The Cisco 7000 router needs to be transported. It’s about
the size of a small filing cabinet and won’t fit in his car trunk. It’s also very expensive
equipment, costing around $70,000 and paid for by Philippine taxpayers with a DOST
grant, so one needs to be extra careful about this piece of hardware. Benjie goes for
the “Humpty Dumpty” approach and proceeds to take it apart so it’ll fit in his car,
with the intention of re-assembling it at PLDT.

“I knew it wouldn’t fit into the trunk,” he remembers. “So all I could do was try to
lighten the load.”

He takes it apart, taking out the power supply, the boards and chassis, and brings
down the hardware a few pieces at a time to his Toyota downstairs.

He manages to get all the parts in the back seat, but the chassis is so big it ends up in
the trunk, with three-fourths of it sticking out. Benjie leaves the trunk open, starts the
car, and heads off for the PLDT network center at the Ramon Cojuangco Building, a
short drive away. Mindful of the $70,000 hardware he’s carrying, he drives at the
snail’s pace of about 5 km/hour. “I knew the route well,” he recalls. “So I knew
precisely which bumps and humps to avoid.”

When he drives up to the PLDT building, the guards on duty were naturally
suspicious of this strange Toyota with the trunk open and all this metal hardware
sticking out. Luckily Benjie has with him a letter explaining who he was and his
assignment. They wave him through, and a PLDT tech guy arrives to assist Benjie.

They unload the Cisco router parts from the car and bring it downstairs to the network
center. It’s the graveyard shift, and the center is virtually deserted. Benjie reassembles
the router (unlike Humpty Dumpty, they managed to put it together again) and with
the help of the PLDT tech guy, lifts the router up to the empty space on a rack on top
of some modems. They plug in all the necessary cables and power it up.
By now it’s around 1 am, and an hour and a half has elapsed since Benjie left his
office.

The Connection
With the Cisco in place, Benjie calls up Sprint again. He talks to the techs, explains
the router’s in place, and that he has keyed in the configuration faxed earlier by
Sprint. PLDT was now ready to connect. “Hold on,” says the voice on the other end.
“We’re going to open her up.”

Sprint activates the port on their side, and Benjie notices the router lights start to
blink. Okay–activity’s going on, he thinks. Benjie sits at his workstation, types in a
few commands. He “pings.” Great, it’s getting better.

“That’s when I when I made my request to see what was the Internet was like at the
time,” Benjie recalls. “They allow me to turn on routing, then they shoved it down,
and I see about about eight or nine pages of data going through my screen. I say, okay,
that’s enough! This is more than I can handle! Then they put it back to static route,
give a couple more parting words and advice, and that was it.”

Benjie put the phone down. It was now 1:15 am. Philnet was now connected to the
Internet.

Celebrating in solitude with Magoo’s

It was history, but no one really the significance of what just went on. For the
guys at Sprint, it was just another day in the office. Over at the PLDT network center,
there were no marching bands, champagne corks popping, or even a lot of
backslapping and “cool” congratulatory comments. Just another graveyard shift.

Benjie of course knew that something great had just occurred. “And then I realized
that I had nothing, not even a Coke to celebrate with,” he remembers. “The only place
I knew at the time that was open 24 hours close by–because I couldn’t leave this baby
too long–was a Magoo’s Pizza.”
“So I drive over to Magoo’s, I get the biggest square pizza they got, I drive back to
PLDT, and when I go back in, I asked the PLDT tech guy, hey you wanna share some
of this? He takes one bite and goes off to sleep, so there I am alone again and start to
finish the whole pizza.”

By now it is 3 am. But Benjie’s job is far from over. He still has to inform Dr. Rudy
Villarica and the Philnet team in Cebu that the connection to Sprint had been made.
That’s scheduled for 5:30 am, which still gives Benjie two and a half-hours to kill.
But it wasn’t going to be boring.

“It was a lot of fun,” he recalls. “Remember, I had 64K bandwidth, a Cisco 7000
router and Internet access all to myself, so for the next two and a half hours I had a lot
to do. Imagine, a full 64K compared to 9600 bps dialup–whoa, this was great! I
downloaded a lot of files and filled up my notebook.”

One of the things Benjie managed to do in that time was run a newsreader program
and post a short message to the Usenet newsgroup soc.culture.filipino, alerting
overseas Filipinos that a connection had been made. The message read:
Subject: The Philippines is In!
As of March 29,1994 at 1:15 am Philippine time, unfortunately
2 days late due
to slight technical difficulties, the Philippines was FINALLY
connected to the
Internet via SprintLink. The Philippine router, a Cisco 7000
router was
attached via the services of PLDT and Sprint communications to
SprintLink’s
router at Stockton Ca. The gateway to the world for the
Philippines will be via
NASA Ames Research Center. For now, a 64K serial link is the
information
highway to the rest of the Internet world.
Calling Cebu
At about 5:30 am, Benjie places a call to Cebu, to Dr. Rudy Villarica, the Philnet
project manager who had been coordinating everything. Villarica, a Cebuano himself ,
was staying at the house of his brother. He was in town for a three-day conference
oddly called “The First International E-Mail Conference” that drew most of the
local networking community to the University of San Carlos (USC) Cebu. Philnet had
boldly announced they would try to get the Internet link up during the
conference. Richie Lozada of Ateneo de Manila, who was then with the Philnet
technical committee, had handcarried a Cisco 4000 router on a flight from Manila to
get USC all hooked up for the conference. And prior to that, Philnet had PLDT
connect USC’s leased line so they were primed and ready.
But it was now March 29, the third and final day of the conference, and nothing had
happened yet, and Villarica was understandably getting worried. So when Benjie
called up, had a maid rouse Villarica from sleep, and informed him, “Sir, it’s all
done,” Villarica was ecstatic. “That’s great! Great!”

“You could tell he was happy,” Benjie remembers, with uncharacteristic

understatement.

His work all done, Benjie packed up his things at PLDT and headed home to his
family. It was now around 6 a.m. and the end of a long and eventful night.

It would be 10:18 am before the Philnet crew at Cebu could establish a live
connection via the PLDT link.

Richie Lozada recalls rushing over to the USC campus to log into the USC Cisco
4000 and establish the link to the Cisco 7000 at PLDT in Makati. By the time the
connection went live, it was right before an audience who had assembled to witness a
demonstration. Everyone recalls much whooping and cheering. People there knew it
was the start of something big, but where it would lead to, no one could be certain.

By this time, Benjie Tan was snug in bed at home grabbing some much-needed shut-
eye. Been there, done that.
THE DAY THE
 PHILIPPINES
HOOKED UP TO
THE NET: PART 1 Posted on August 17, 2011 by Jim Ayson

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.
.

PART 1: PHILNET PHASE ONE

.
 University of San Carlos
“WE’RE in.”

These two words announced to a crowd of conference participants gathered at

the University of San Carlos in Talamban, Cebu, that a Philippine network
called Philnet had just established a live connection to the global Internet. It
was 10:18 a.m. on March 29, 1994, and a big cheer went up from the crowd.
Today, it’s hard to imagine life without e-mail. Without the World Wide Web.
Without URLs or domain names. Without spam, Flash, MP3s and instant messaging.
No ISP bills, prepaid Net cards, or cable modems. No ISPs. Just seven years ago, we
didn’t have these things. The Net is something a lot of us take for granted today. And
March 29 is the day we commemorate its entry into the Philippines.

It wasn’t an accident of nature. It took a resolute group of young, idealistic people

from the country’s top universities and research centers, working hard on Philnet, to
bring it all together.

What surprises people used to today’s megabucks-swilling dotcom landscape is that

Philnet wasn’t underwritten by a major telecommunications conglomerate eager to
cash in. In the early ’90s, big business or even the general public didn’t care too much
about the Internet. It was mainly populated by nerd communities at universities and
research institutions and the occasional hacker underground.

It had its own rules and culture, which were intimidating to outsiders. But it also held
the promise of access to a wealth of information available on tap, which made it
particularly appealing to universities. The Philippines was no exception.

The Beginnings: E-mail

.

Richie Lozada, then a computer science instructor at Ateneo de Manila and now
director for E-Commerce at Microsoft Philippines, recalls those early days, circa
1993.
“It started off as a small university-driven project. Back then, it was Ateneo, De La
Salle and UP Diliman just trying to set up an e-mail network among ourselves.”
Back then, e-mail was the biggest thing–and the only thing. No real-time chat, no
Web services.

The universities linked up using a Unix dial-up mail protocol called UUCP.
Generally, there were no problems sending mail, as long as the phone line was good.
“In those days, half the game was figuring out which telephone lines would work,”
Lozada recalls. “The telco infrastructure during those days wasn’t exactly optimal.”

Lozada was assigned to work on the project by Arnie del Rosario, head of the
Ateneo’s Computer center. Luis Sarmenta–who had achieved local notoriety as a
student by writing some antivirus software–was initially working on the project but
went off to MIT for his Ph. D., and Lozada took his place.
Over at De La Salle University (DLSU), Kelsey Hartigan-Go (now assistant vice
president for IT at SM Prime Holdings) handled the unsavory task of interfacing with
the Ateneans. DLSU had already established a campus-wide network as far back as
1989, and Hartigan-Go (who had experienced the real Internet as a grad student in the
UK) had even established a workable facility for DLSU that could send mail to the
Internet. As far back as 1991 he was dialing up to Joel Disini’s (now CEO of DotPH
Inc.) commercial e-mail service via the UUCP protocol and sending mail out through
Disini’s Applelink and UUnet gateways.
Rodel Atanacio and Rommel Feria at UP Diliman rounded up the group. Rodel and
Rommel had already achieved some cyberspace fame by maintaining their Bulletin
Board System, UP BBS, which was a dial-up information system for all things UP.
These techies, together with other young computer jocks working at the Department
of Science and Technology, formed the first version of the group that was to be
known as the Philnet Technical Commitee, and were to play lead roles in wiring up
the universities to the Net.
Del Rosario brought the university e-mail project to the attention of Glenn Sipin of
the DOST’s Philippine Council for Advanced Science and Technology Research
and Development group, who agreed to provide some funding. Sipin ponied
up P60,000and the inter-university project shifted to another level, now called Philnet
phase one.
The funding was used to improve the e-mail set up and incorporate something new:
Sending e-mail to the real global Internet by dialing up to a gateway. Ateneo had
relations with the Victoria University in Australia, which offered the use of its
Internet gateway at no charge, provided the Philippine universities dialed up at their
own expense.
The project worked. Students from all three universities could send e-mail to the
Internet by routing messages through Philnet’s gateway in Ateneo, which then
connected to Australia, and then piped out the mail to the Internet. Incoming messages
went back in through the same route. Because the system used IDD to connect to
Australia, PLDT bills started to rack up, and the initial grant didn’t last very long.

Still, the results were encouraging enough to make the DOST and Philnet consider
taking the next step: Full Internet access.
Enter Philnet Phase Two.
Posted on August 18, 2011 by Jim Ayson

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.
.

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.
Villarica remembers that events took place quite fast. He had joined the IRF as a
trustee and in October 1993 was handed an assignment by the IRF executive
director Cesar Santos who told him, “Rudy, this is right up your alley.”
That assignment turned out to be Philnet. IRF was contacted by the DOST to handle
the funds management and project implementation because while Philnet was a
university consortium, it had no real legal identity to accept a grant of the magnitude
that they were planning to request.
Also, the DOST had noticed elements of the age-old competition
between Ateneo and De La Salle brewing again and they wanted a neutral party to be
in charge.
Villarica agreed to meet the Philnet technical team. Del Rosario and Sipin were
excited about moving the project toward full Internet connectivity. At the meeting,
they drew up a three-page project brief, with a “shopping list” of equipment and
communication lines needed to make it a reality. Initially, Philnet estimated the
project would cost about P8.5 million. Right after the meeting, Villarica went over the
shopping list with Cesar Santos, and made some notes and corrected some of the
figures in the proposal.
He told Santos he had a scheduled trip to the United States to visit one of his children
enrolled in graduate studies at Syracuse University in New York. He was leaving the
next day but would be back in a month and, in the meantime, maybe Santos could sum
up the project cost and submit it to the DOST for funding.

“Cesar, bahala ka muna dito, (take care of things here while I’m away)” were
Villarica’s parting words.
In the first week of December 1993, Villarica returned from his trip and checked on
Santos.

“Good news, Rudy,” said Santos. “We have the project formally approved by the
DOST with a memorandum of agreement. And you’ve been assigned as project
administrator.” Apparently, the DOST had approved the funding on Nov. 23.

“Magkano ang budget na na-approve? (How big a budget was approved?)” asked
Villarica. The grant turned out to be P12.5 million for the first year. Villarica thought
it was fair. But how should one proceed from there?
Immediately, Villarica set a personal goal for project completion. The Internet
connection should be completed by April, he thought, a mere four months away. He
didn’t know if it was realistic, but it was as good a target date as any. And besides, he
had already made a promise to Dr. John Brule.
.

Dr. Brule I presume?

.
 John D. Brule
Dr. John D. Brule was a Professor Emeritus in Electrical and Computer
Engineering at Syracuse University in New York. About 30 years ago, he had been
sent to the Philippines on a teaching assignment under a project of the Southeast
Asian Treaty Organization. A jolly, easy-going man, Brule and his wife easily fell
in love with the warmth of Filipinos. He enjoyed the teaching experience so much, he
later returned to the Philippines whenever he could, and taught pro bono at
the University of San Carlos in Talamban, Cebu during his stays as a visiting
professor.
As the Internet unfolded in the late ’80s, Brule was naturally excited to share the
learning opportunities of the technology with Filipinos. Unfortunately, there were no
local universities hooked up to the Net at the time. Then sometime in 1993, Brule got
wind of Philnet.

Brule had an idea that a conference would be a good way to evangelize the learning
potentials of the Internet to the Philippine academic community. He was sure he
wanted it held in Cebu, having been convinced like many Cebuanos of the inequity of
having to deal with “Imperial Manila” all the time. This time Cebu was going to take
center stage.
But a full fledged Internet conference would be impossible to demonstrate at the time
since only e-mail was starting to be readily available in the Philippines at the time,
either from Philnet, commercial e-mail providers, or amateur networks
like FidoNetbulletin boards. So Brule decided to call the event “The First
International E-Mail Conference.”
John Brule’s Original Announcement for the “First
International E-Mail Conference”
Workshop on the Use of Electronic Mail in the Philippines
Date: March 29-31, 1994
Venue: University of San Carlos, Talamban Campus
Organized by: College of Engineering, University of San Carlos,
Cebu City, Philippines
It is recognized that the number of email users is growing
rapidly in the
Philippines but there still exist numerous potential users in
academe,
industries, government and NGOs, who are either unaware or
are unable to
gain access to existing email facilities.
The purpose of the Workshop is to gather providers, users, and
potential
users of email services to present and discuss the current status
and
availability of email services and how they can be used for
various purposes.
The text of the full e-mail is archived here.
Immediately, he spread the word on online communities frequented by overseas
Filipinos such as the STACnet mailing list and the Usenet
newsgroup soc.culture.filipino. He was also cooking up a batch of descriptions of the
conference to send to Philnet’s Del Rosario. In October 1993, while at Syracuse, he
casually bumped into his old friend, Dr. Villarica, visiting one of his sons taking
graduate courses in the university.
Brule and Villarica had first met back in 1987. Villarica’s son Marty had just been
accepted for graduate studies in engineering at Syracuse.

Villarica accompanied his son to look around and eventually was introduced to Brule.
When Brule mentioned he was often in Cebu to teach at the University of San Carlos,
a common chord was struck as Rudy Villarica and wife Pilar are Cebuanos and they
knew some of the people Brule mentioned. Pretty soon they got to know each other
quite well, and would visit each other’s homes when in town.

Villarica casually mentioned to Brule that he had been placed in charge of Philnet,
and the plan was to get a live Internet connection going.

Brule couldn’t believe his luck.

“Wonderful! How soon can you get the Internet link-up?” he asked.

Brule had scheduled the E-Mail conference for March 1994 and had already invited
some Net-savvy overseas Filipinos he met through STACnet to participate as
speakers.
“Do you think you can arrange for a live link-up at the conference?”

Villarica mulled over the question a bit.

“Well John, it’s going to be a close call,” he answered.

But eventually Villarica promised Brule he could get the connection up by that date
and the first live connection would coincide with Brule’s conference. Privately,
Villarica wondered if he could meet the promised deadline, which was only four
months away. But he was certainly going to try.

THE DAY THE

PHILIPPINES
HOOKED UP TO
THE NET: PART 3
 (THE
CISCO KIDS) Posted on August 22, 2011 by Jim Ayson

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

.

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
includeUP 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.
Villarica recalls that Philnet tried to get special terms from PLDT in light of the
academic nature of the project and the DOST backing. But PLDT was in no mood to
give Philnet any special discounts, even after meeting with then company
president Antonio “Tony Boy” Cojuangco.
Cojuangco also had some inkling about what effect the Internet was going to have on
his business.

“This is going to affect the telephone companies,” he told Philnet. But in the end,
business was business, and PLDT became the carrier for Philnet.

The $70,000 Cisco 7000

Also on the shopping list were routers, which would connect the university networks
to the leased lines. The technical committee had been recommending Cisco routers
for their robustness and Villarica had some meetings with Willy Gan. Gan’s
company ComNet was an authorized reseller of Cisco. After a discussion on router
models, Philnet settled on the top-of-the-line Cisco 7000as the main router used to
connect to the
IPL, and a Cisco 2501 for each university node. This equipment didn’t come cheap, as
the 7000 series was running at $70,000 and each Cisco 2501 went for $30,000.
.

Selling the project

.
With all the costs involved in setting up and operating Philnet, Villarica could see the
original grant wouldn’t last long. So Philnet had to have a viable business plan, and
operate on a cost-recovery model.
Since Philnet was an academic network, the primary clients were universities who
were referred to as members. But each educational member involved was going to
have pay to participate. There was no such thing as a free lunch. Each Internet
connection was going to cost them P30,000 per month.
“That was a hard sell,” Villarica recalls. “They complained: ‘Where are we going to
get that kind of money?’ But we told them: ‘If you want to be the first, you’ll have to
ante up.’”

Eventually, Philnet gave the schools a grace period of three to four months of free
access. After having tasted what the Internet was like, they were off and running.

One of the first non-academic institutions connected to the Net was the Asian
Development Bank (ADB).
Educational partners weren’t going to pay all the bills however, and Philnet had to
consider providing bandwidth to other groups as well. The first ones considered were
international organizations based in the Philippines like the Asian Development
Bank (ADB), the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), and later on,
the Asian Institute of Management (AIM). These groups were called “preferred
members” and were offered an Internet connection at the rate of $3,000 a month.
Mike Hawkins, a data communications specialist at ADB, was an especially tough
sell. Villarica recalls at one of the first meetings that he was worried about Philnet
being merely “a network run by amateurs,” referring to the youth and relative
inexperience of the Philnet technical committee. It wasn’t until Philnet had finally
gone online that Mike changed his tune.
“Mike started to call me up,” he remembers. “Before that it was: ‘Don’t call us, we’ll
call you.’ Now it was ‘Count us in.’”

Another significant client was ComNet, the vendor supplying the Cisco routers. Gan,
ComNet’s president, himself saw the commercial potential of Internet access and
signed up as a preferred member. This would lead to the formation of Mosaic
Communications or MosCom, the first full-access commercial Internet service
provider in the country.
Villarica never fails to emphasize the importance of the commercial clients.

“Without the preferred members, we could not have lasted even one year. The money
would have dried up. But because of that we were able to keep Philnet rolling.”
HOOKED PART 4:
SHOWDOWN AT
THE .PH CORRAL Posted on September 6, 2011 by Jim Ayson

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
thePhilnet 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.”

Hartigan-Go recalls that it was a “very heated discussion.” The talks continued
virtually after the Club Filipino meeting, eventually spilling over to technical Filipino
mailing lists like STACnet. In the meantime, the inability of Philnet to
issue EDU.PH domains for the universities was becoming a very real problem.
If Philnet went online, email addresses of the universities would need numerical
IP addresses at the end instead of meaningful domains. With no .PH domain, Philnet
registered the domain Philnet.net with the US-based InterNIC as a contingency
measure.
After a couple of board meetings, Villarica returned to Disini with an offer to
reimburse him for all his expenses while administering the .PH domain, but said that
Philnet could not give him free leased-line access. Disini refused. Villarica tried to
appeal to his patriotism, also to no avail.

Then Villarica tried the back door to get control of the domain. Philnet had an early
supporter in the person of Dr. Steven Goldstein of the US National Science
Foundation (NSF). At the time, the NSF managed much of the Internet infrastructure,
Goldstein worked as a tireless evangelist of the Internet worldwide, helping various
countries get their infrastructure started. He once paid a visit to Philnet in 1993 upon
the DOST’s request, to see if he could assist in the project.
“He was supposed to come here and teach us how to do these things,” recalled
Villarica. “But when he arrived, everything was already plantsado (prepared) and he
was surprised.”
After talks with Disini bogged down, Villarica contacted Goldstein and asked him to
assist in lobbying with IANA to reassign the .PH domain to Philnet. His e-mail went:
“Our talks with J.E. Disini, present administrator for the .PH
domain name have ended abruptly due to his intransigence in
turning over the name to Philnet. He is demanding
compensation for “turning over” the administratorship to us.

“In view of your vast knowledge of Internet, could you please

enlighten me as to how we could obtain the PH domain name for
Philnet since our foundation has been mandated and supported
by the Department of Science and Technology to set up the
country-wide network for R&D and educational purposes
primarily?”
Goldstein did what he could behind the scenes, but was unsuccessful. At the time,
IANA placed more authority on technically savvy individuals than on governments in
Internet maters. They also wanted to stay away from foreign politics and infighting,
preferring that the parties work it out internally.

After consulting with colleagues at the NSF, he replied in an e-mail dated March 23,
1994:

“My colleagues and I have spent much time during the past
week discussing via e-mail the various sides of the “problem”
which you allude to. We have also had direct communication
from Joel Disini. Mr Disini states categorically that he well
delegate a complete and appropriate subdomain(s) such
as gov.ph or edu.ph to Philnet *immediately* and with no
changes.”
Goldstein also noted:

“As long as Mr. Disini discharges his responsibilities properly,

there are no grounds for ‘impeaching’ him. From what he has
written to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) it
appears that he is quite ready to assign you an appropriate
subdomain *instantaneously*. This will be the fastest route to
getting Philnet ‘on the air,’ and I ask you to give it serious
consideration.”
Philnet would have pursued the matter further but Villarica also received around this
time, a rather nasty hate mail from Randy Bush, then a high-ranking pillar of the
Internet community. Apparently appraised of Disini’s situation, he “flamed” Villarica
and Philnet decided to drop the matter altogether. It simply wasn’t worth the
aggravation.
Despite Disini’s letter to IANA, Philnet continued to wait for
the EDU.PH and GOV.PHdomains to be turned over. Philnet had to follow them
up.”It took us over a month and half to get them working at the universities,” recalled
Hartigan Go.

HOOKED PART 5:
OFF TO CEBU –
THE
FIRST CONTACT Posted on September 8, 2011 by Jim Ayson

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.

Roberto “Obet” Verzola of the E-Mail Center, an email-company that catered to the
NGO community, came down to give a presentation. Even Joel Disini, who ran an e-
mail service of his own, was sent an invitation, but he decided not to go.

This author also received an invitation. I

was there to co-present the status of the Philippine Fidonet BBS network (a
nationwide network of interconnected bulletin board systems) along with Jojo
Sybico, who ran the Cebu leg of the network. Even in 1994, Cebu had an active
online scene going on. Sybico’s organization was called C.E.B.U. (Computer
Enthusiasts and BBS Users) and they were tasked to set up the dial up email
facilities for conference participants.
Bombim Cadiz (now the president of PHnet) was there representing Xavier
University in Cagayan de Oro. He had just received his M.S. in Computer Science
at Virginia Tech and had returned to the Philippines to teach at Xavier. Just a few
days after arriving, Bombim was on a boat to Cebu to attend the conference. He
remembers that at first glance, the conference proceedings were rather ho-hum and
unimpressive.
“It was probably because I had just returned from the U.S. with an MS in Computer
Science and thought that I already knew what everyone was talking about,” he
recalled. “I found it funny that they set up an entire conference around the E-mail
concet when what I wanted to show everyone was the power of the Internet.”

Even Jojo Sybico was unimpressed with the proceedings. “Personally I found the
whole thing a bit geeky,” he said with tongue-in-cheek humor.

But Cadiz recalls being impressed with the Philnet technical team. “I thought the
group of ADMU, DLSU, UPD (UP Diliman), UPLB (UP Los Banos) and others were
closely knit and were really working together to bring everything up. Then, I was still
an outsider, not knowing anyone. I was impressed by their enthusiasm and
camaraderie.” Later on, Bombim Cadiz would rise to head the PHnet foundation,
which grew out of the Philnet project.
Despite the staid conference proceedings, there was an unmistakable electricity in the
air. Brule and Villarica had announced that the Philnet-Internet link might go live
during the conference, and everyone wanted to be around when it happened.

Prior to the conference,

Ateneo’s Richie Lozada had planed in earlier hand carrying a Cisco 4000 router to be
attached to a leased line connection provided to USC by the Philippine Long
Distance Telephone Cp. (PLDT) in time for the conference. The USC router would
connect to Philnet’s main Cisco 7000 router at PLDT in Makati. Everything in Cebu
was primed and ready. But when the connection was exactly going to happen was
anyone’s guess.
PLDT had been doing tests on the leased line to the US for several days before the
connection to US Internet provider Sprintlink could be activated. ComNet head
techie Benjie Tan was assigned to activate the main router in Manila.

First Contact
During the conference, Villarica was getting anxious. he made several calls to
ComNet’s office in Makati to follow up the connection.

Then on the evening of March 28, Benjie Tan got the word that the line was ready.He
flew in straight from a training trip in Hong Kong to setup the main Cisco 7000 router
at PLDT’s network center at the Ramon Cojuangco Building in Makati and activate
the link to Sprint.
At 1:15 am on March 29, Tan established a live Internet connection between the
Philnet network and Sprint. Soon afterwards, he posted the following message on the
Usenet newsgroup soc.culture.filipino:
Subject: The Philippines is In!
As of March 29,1994 at 1:15 am Philippine time, unfortunately
2 days late due to slight technical difficulties, the Philippines
was FINALLY connected to the Internet via SprintLink. The
Philippine router, a Cisco 7000 router was attached via the
services of PLDT and Sprint communications to SprintLink’s
router at Stockton Ca. The gateway to the world for the
Philippines will be via NASA Ames Research Center. For now, a
64K serial link is the information highway to the rest of the
Internet world.
Ar 5:30 AM, Tan called up Dr. Villarica in Cebu, rousing him from his slumber. “Sir,
it’s all done,” he said. “That’s great! Great!” Villarica exclaimed.
Villarica put the word out to the Philnet technical committee that the connection just
went live in Manila. They were to assemble at USC early morning to activate the
connection to the main router at PLDT in order to get the live Internet link going in
time for the presentations that day. The conference was drawing to a close, and it
needed to end with a bang.
Richie Lozada recalls having slept in late due to a hard night of partying. The team
actually expected the connection to happen at a later time. They groggily woke up to
the news that the link in Manila went live.

“My first objective – since I came in a bit later than the rest – was to rush to San
Carlos and look for an access terminal to log into the Cisco 4000. Back then you
couldn’t just carry notebooks – you had to reply on workstations actually connected.”

Lozada logged in through a terminal located at the main auditorium at USC where
seminar proceedings were going on. The router needed to be readjusted to divert the
connection from the campus local area network to the main Philnet router at PLDT.
Then he had to adjust the presentation computer that was hooked up to the projector
so that it could access the Internet. It was a rush job, and he was configuring settings
even as people started to stream into the auditorium.

When Lozada had finished, Dr. John Brule was about to commence a demonstration
of live chat. Lozada informed him the connection was up. Brule nodded. He executed
the chat commands to chat with his son Mark over at Syracuse.

He connected. “We’re in,” he announced. A cheer went up from the audience. It

was 10:18 am, March 29, 1994.
Lozada recalls an announcement went out, possibly from Dr. Villarica. “This is not a
dial-up connection. This is the real thing. Our link to the Internet is finally
live.” People were applauding like crazy. People were thinking, finally the Internet is
here, and we finally had live connectivity to the outside world.
We had made contact, and from that moment on, the Philippines would never be
the same again.

THE DAY THE

PHILIPPINES
 HOOKED UP TO
THE NET: PART 6
– AFTERMATH Posted on September 9, 2011 by Jim Ayson

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)
.

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.