One of the key challenges is the language barrier. In Africa there are three major languages spoken, or used in professional environments: French, English, some Portuguese. And trying to bring the community from all those different language backgrounds to focus on a project like AFRINIC was hard.
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He’s a founding member of the WIDE Project that is the initiating R&D and business of the Internet in Japan, as well as collaborating with global partners in order to make the Internet the real infrastructure for everyone.
This is something which we believe has to be stressed, that there are users which cannot be served by the commercial networks at the moment at a decent price. Everything eventually comes down to price and the idea of being able to have aggregated networks which can be used by high-performance users as well as the less-aggressive people, if you like, can be built and operated economically if you have the right conditions.
None of us predicted YouTube, none of us predicted Facebook, none of us predicted Twitter, none of us predicted so many things we take for granted today. I’m not gonna get in the guessing game anymore. What I do think is, the more people of good intentions get involved in this, the more this becomes about people and less about profit, the better off we’ll be.
I was getting a bit annoyed with the fact that I was traveling to universities all over the country and always had to go through all kinds of trouble to get online. You may not know this but back in the time you would have to register your MAC address at the IT center of the university or get a card to stick into your laptop. And it was such a hassle and I thought, but why?
Probably the thing that I’m most known for would be helping to evangelize the use of the Internet in public libraries. In the United States now, if you walk into a library you’ll see public computers set out and people can get free time on them. But it wasn’t always like that.
Be bold. Explore things. Be willing to challenge the status quo. Not necessarily like throw everything out. Not the baby with the bathwater, as we say. But don’t be afraid to experiment. You know, just because it’s always been done one way doesn’t mean that there might not be another way to approach the problem. And don’t think things can’t be done.
The hard part was that everything was new at the same time. There was new hardware. There were new protocols. There was a new implementation of protocols in the operating system. It was actually difficult to figure out how to build protocol software in the operating systems. We had new applications. Things that…you have to understand at the time people didn’t use networks. So everything was being done at the same time.
It’s a great honor to be inducted in the Internet Hall of Fame. I don’t do it in my name alone. I do it for all the Peruvians who work in this network we built in the 90s. We learned very well the teachings of Randy Bush. Sometimes when he taught us technology with love, and we saw poetic, hippie, unrepentant words. And we created with that a vision.
RNP was launched in September 1989, exactly thirty years ago this month. So we’re now at the stage of looking back and seeing how we are at present.