The World of the World Wide Web

  |  Command Line Heroes Team   Histoire de la technologie

Command Line Heroes • • The World of the World Wide Web | Command Line Heroes

The World of the World Wide Web | Command Line Heroes

About the episode

1995 laid the groundwork for a truly global World Wide Web. But not every country took the same path to connecting to the internet. Some resisted, wanting to create their own version. Others had to fight for access, not wanting to be left behind. And while we made huge strides in connecting the world in those early years, we still have a long way to go.

Julien Mailland recounts the rollout of France’s Minitel service—how it was years ahead of the internet, but eventually lost its lead. Steve Goldstein explains what was involved in building the infrastructure to expand the NSFNET beyond the United States. Gianluigi Negro shares how China pushed for its connection, and how different it would be compared to the typical U.S. connection. And Christian O'Flaherty covers how costs weighed heavily on Argentina’s attempts to join the growing international network.

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Transcription

From Georgia to Palo Alto, from Oslo to Singapore, a vast array of information is being made available in attractive, easy-to-use form and for free, over the internet. A global electronic mall is under construction. People congregate here, interact here, and find the information they want. And here too... In 1995, the world was coming online. But that global electronic mall wasn't being built everywhere in the same way. There's an old quote from the author, William Gibson, that you might know, "The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed." And that was never more true than the mid-90s when countries around the planet were racing to join the digital revolution. By that point, 9% of Americans were already online, but only 2% of people living in Eastern Europe and Asia had access to the internet. In some histories, the internet is this American invention that gets packed up and exported to everybody else. It's a cartoonish idea of a global village where everybody comes to hang out, but things were a lot more complicated than that. Every nation has its own economic, cultural, and political dynamics that fundamentally changed the way they came online. I'm Saron Yitbarek and this is Command Line Heroes, an original podcast from Red Hat. We've devoted all season to that pivotal year, 1995, when earlier networks like the ARPANET and the NSFNET gave way to the world wide web. But when we talk about the shift to online life, we often take an American point of view, yet different countries have very different onramps to the internet and the world wide web. So for this episode, we're breaking it up into three mini episodes. We'll visit 3 different nations to learn how they each built their own online futures back in 1995. Let's start our time-traveling journey with France. In 1995, the internet was arriving in France, but France Telecom, the giant telecommunications company now known as Orange was not so happy about the internet's arrival. One senior executive was even telling journalists, the internet would be banned, and why? Because France already had an internet of its own, thank you very much. I grew up with this system called Minitel. Julien Mailland is an associate professor of telecommunications at Indiana University, but he grew up in France in the 70s and 80s, and he wrote a book on the network that thrived during that time. The book was called Minitel and that was also the name of France's precursor to the internet. So what was Minitel? Minitel was a computer system that was rolled out into a large-scale production by the French government, through the Post and Telephone Ministry in 1983. You'd head down to your local post office and they'd give you a small terminal called a Minitel. Imagine a tiny desktop computer complete with a tiny keyboard and modem, all totally free. You bring your terminal home, plug it into your phone line and voila, access to a wide variety of Minitel sites. Starting very early in the mid 80s, basically everyone in France had access to things that wouldn't reach the rest of the world until the late 90s. Anything from online chat, online commerce, any information you can get online. Now, before you start tweeting a correction at me, yes, the U.S. had bulletin board services and yes, other countries had systems too. There was Presto in the U.K. and BTX in Germany, but in the 1980s nobody's network had anything like the reach that Minitel had in France. Millions of Minitel terminals were installed, and it's estimated that eventually half the French population was using them. Very much everyone was online and had access to all these services that only became mainstream in the rest of the world after 1995. How'd this happen? Necessity was the mother of invention. In the 1970s, France's old analog telephone network was in shambles. New lines were being installed by a nationalized company called PTT, and they could take years to install a new line. It was basically a disaster. It was not on par to what you think of one of the big world powers. At the same time, the U.S. grew more and more dominant in the field of telecommunications. France, I think has always been very concerned about U.S. cultural domination. After the war, people called it Coca-Colonization. So France actually had 2 problems. They had to update their crumbling phone system for starters, and they also had to fend off the Americans. The solution to both problems lay in digitizing the telephone network. There was a very important report in 1978 called, "The Computerization of Society." And this report established a new vision for French society where access to information would be a right. The report envisioned a future where every French citizen would have access to information services through their telephone line. It was an ambitious vision, and the French government decided to make it a reality. The government decided to skip the analog phone book entirely and go directly to an electronic version. They would give every household a free Minitel terminal, and instead of printing phone books, they would provide the directory service electronically. This was a massive undertaking. The French government was essentially betting the future of its telecommunications infrastructure on a digital system that didn't yet exist. But they had the political will and the resources to make it happen. By 1983, Minitel was operational, and by the late 1980s, millions of French households had Minitel terminals. It was the most successful implementation of a national information network that the world had ever seen. But Minitel wasn't just about phone directories. It quickly evolved into a platform for all kinds of services: online banking, train schedules, weather reports, news, shopping, and even online dating. Minitel had everything that we think of as defining the internet: e-commerce, social networking, online communities, information services. All of this was available in France a decade before it became mainstream anywhere else. So when the internet arrived in France in the 1990s, there was actually resistance to it. Why would the French abandon their perfectly good Minitel system for this chaotic, unregulated American network? There was definitely a clash of cultures. Minitel was centralized, regulated, and French. The internet was decentralized, chaotic, and dominated by English-language content from America. For many French people, the internet felt like cultural imperialism. But ultimately, the internet's global reach and lower costs proved irresistible. By the late 1990s, even France Telecom was promoting internet access, and Minitel began its long decline. The irony is that Minitel was technologically superior to the early internet in many ways. It was more reliable, more secure, and easier to use. But the internet had something that Minitel could never have: global connectivity. The French experience with Minitel shows us that there were alternative paths to the digital future. The internet as we know it wasn't inevitable—it was the result of specific choices and circumstances. Now let's travel to our second destination: China. In 1995, China was just beginning to connect to the global internet, but they were doing it on their own terms. I was involved in the National Science Foundation's International Connections Program, which was designed to help countries around the world connect to the internet. Steve Goldstein was a program director at the National Science Foundation in the 1990s. He oversaw efforts to extend the NSFNET backbone internationally, helping countries build their own connections to the global internet. One of the most interesting cases was China. They were very interested in connecting to the internet, but they wanted to do it in a way that maintained their sovereignty and control over their domestic network. China's approach to the internet was fundamentally different from most other countries. While many nations simply connected to the existing internet infrastructure, China was determined to build its own parallel system. China's internet development was driven by both opportunity and caution. They saw the potential of global connectivity, but they also wanted to maintain control over information flows within their borders. Gianluigi Negro is an assistant professor in Chinese language and culture at the University of Siena. He's studied how China's unique political and cultural context shaped its approach to internet development. From the very beginning, Chinese leaders understood that the internet could be both a powerful tool for economic development and a potential threat to political stability. So they approached it very strategically. China's first international internet connection was established in 1994, linking to the global internet through a 64-kilobit satellite connection via IXC Communications in the United States. But this was just the beginning. The Chinese government immediately began working on building their own domestic internet infrastructure. They didn't want to be dependent on foreign networks for their internal communications. This led to the development of ChinaNet, which became the country's primary internet backbone. But even as they built this infrastructure, Chinese authorities were thinking about how to regulate and control internet content. The concept of the "Great Firewall" didn't emerge all at once, but the thinking behind it was present from the very early days of China's internet development. There was always this tension between wanting the benefits of global connectivity and maintaining political control. By 1995, China had multiple internet connections and was rapidly expanding its domestic network. But the Chinese internet was already developing along different lines than the internet in other countries. Chinese internet development was much more centralized and government-directed than in most other countries. The state played a direct role in planning and implementing internet infrastructure, rather than leaving it entirely to market forces. This approach has continued to shape China's internet to this day. While China is now home to some of the world's largest internet companies and has the most internet users of any country, its internet remains distinct from the global internet in important ways. What was fascinating about working with China on internet connectivity was seeing how they adapted the technology to fit their own needs and priorities. They weren't just copying what other countries were doing—they were creating their own vision of what the internet could be. The Chinese experience demonstrates that the internet isn't a monolithic global network, but rather a collection of interconnected national networks, each shaped by local policies and priorities. Now let's visit our third and final destination: Argentina. In the early 1990s, Argentina was struggling to connect to the global internet, but not for lack of interest or technical capability. In the early 90s, there was a monopoly in international communications in Argentina. Only one company was allowed to provide international telecommunications services, and they were not interested in providing internet connectivity. Christian O'Flaherty is the regional vice president for Latin America and the Caribbean at the Internet Society. He lived through Argentina's early internet development and understands the unique challenges the country faced. The telecommunications landscape in Argentina in the early 1990s was very different from what we see today. There was very little competition, and the incumbent providers had no incentive to invest in new technologies like the internet. Argentina's journey to the internet was complicated by economic and regulatory issues that were unique to the country's situation in the 1990s. But there were determined individuals working to overcome these obstacles. The breakthrough came from the academic and research community. They were the ones who really pushed for internet connectivity, because they could see the potential benefits for research and collaboration. One of the key figures in Argentina's internet development was Emma Perez Ferreira, a physicist who had been running a regional academic network called RETINA since the 1980s. Emma was really the pioneer who made internet connectivity possible in Argentina. She had the vision and the persistence to push through all the bureaucratic and technical obstacles. Ferreira's approach was to bypass the domestic telecommunications monopoly by connecting directly to the international internet through the United States. The solution was to establish a satellite connection to Florida, which would then connect to the NSFNET backbone in the United States. This allowed Argentina to access the global internet without depending on the domestic monopoly provider. This connection was established in 1992, making Argentina one of the first Latin American countries to have full internet connectivity. But it wasn't easy to convince institutions to invest in this new technology. In the early 90s, there were a few nodes with international connections, but they were super expensive satellite connections. The general public didn't have access at all. Academics in Argentina were pushing for a more genuine connection to networks beyond their borders. It was mostly the pressure from those professors and researchers that were working in Europe and the U.S. and were using the internet in those countries. So when they came back to Argentina and other countries, they started looking for ways to get similar services. You remember that monopoly O'Flaherty mentioned? That was an international company called Telintel. And O'Flaherty told us that in the 90s, Telintel was dragging its feet, delaying the arrival of an affordable internet. They didn't want to provide that service. A truly online Argentina was never going to be possible until somebody got them connected in an affordable way. And there didn't seem to be a local solution. But physicist Emma Perez Ferreira was looking beyond their borders. She's considered the person most responsible for bringing the internet to the people of Argentina. She was a national pioneer and also a well-respected pioneer in the region. Emma was able to insist on many different areas of the government and elsewhere, and she was able to get this authorization to connect to the internet, getting service from whoever was able to provide it. If Telintel wasn't going to step up, then she would. Since the 1980s Ferreira had been the Director of a network called RETINA, that connected academics at a regional level. But she saw the potential for her mission to grow in the 90s when America began providing the NSFNET's backbone to the world. Suddenly through that ICM project of Steve Goldstein's, it was possible for Argentina to patch into that backbone and join a global internet. She received authorization to create a direct link via Florida. O'Flaherty describes the collaboration with American partners. There was a lot of support and interest from different parties to help developing countries and in particular, Latin American countries, to connect to the internet. Starting in 1992, the connection to the NSFNET ran through the city of Homestead in Florida using the PanAmSat satellite. The router was managed by Sprint and the National Science Foundation paid the management port fees. Many Latin American countries received support for equipment, and the port was provided free of charge. They facilitated the connection through training, and helped in getting our own IP addresses, and things like that. But getting Argentina's institutions to step up, wasn't as easy as you might think, because unlike the situation we heard about in France, most authorities in Argentina didn't yet understand what the internet could provide. It was difficult to demonstrate that it was worth paying for those services for something that nobody knew about. So nobody used the internet when she was asking for funds and convincing the universities and the research institutions that it was worth spending the money that way. Ultimately, leaders like Ferreira were able to tie Argentina's networks to America's NSFNET. Up until that time, less than 0.1% of people in Argentina were internet users. But those numbers started exploding once the NSFNET connection was made, and today, three-quarters of Argentinians are online. We could keep on going. There are dozens of other stories we can't tell in a single episode. Every country had its own heroes, its own unique issues, when connecting to the rest of the world. Nobody's 1995 was the same. Our 1995 season has been telling a story about how the modern online experience arrived. But we have to remember, history doesn't really happen that way, because these other stories and timelines were always running in parallel. And yes, 1995 was a dramatic shift point, when the world wide web started racing around the planet, bringing with it a certain sameness to the internet. But when we dig into our history, we remember that the networks we share actually live inside distinct cultures with their own distinct histories and definitely their own futures. 41% of the world is still not online, and over the next couple of decades, as billions more people join the internet, it can't be just about exporting some American tech. And it can't be about folding the world into one tidy version of events. It's going to be about the internet meeting every country's own ambitions and hopes. You can learn more about how the internet came to France, China, Argentina, and other countries by checking out our bonus material at redhat.com/commandlineheroes. Next time in our season finale, the dot-com bubble that began in 1995 is finally going to burst. We'll see what lessons were learned when the year 2000 turned the tech world on its head. Until then, I'm Saron Yitbarek and this is Command Line Heroes, an original podcast from Red Hat. Keep on coding.

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About the show

Command Line Heroes

During its run from 2018 to 2022, Command Line Heroes shared the epic true stories of developers, programmers, hackers, geeks, and open source rebels, and how they revolutionized the technology landscape. Relive our journey through tech history, and use #CommandLinePod to share your favorite episodes.