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.
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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.
Part of my networking experience as I grew as a networking person, and Internet person, people would come up and say, “Well what was it like to be a woman in a men’s field?” And I’ve gotta compliment the Merit folks who hired the NSFNET staff. They were gender-blind.
So many previous awardees have spoken of the magic sauce of the Internet. The opposite of secret sauce, I guess, because they all use the word “open.” Open standards, open architecture, open source. They said this openness is what made the Internet the Internet. Which sounds mostly right, although not much like how we experience the Internet today.
In 1993 when we first started talking about the digital divide and doing the work to define the digital divide, there were 15 million people on this planet on the Internet. Today there are 4 billion. A lot of people in this room did a lot of work to make that happen. But we have a lot that we need to do still.