It was the beginning of 1990, and I was typing my doctoral thesis on one of the few computers available at the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics (Impa). I noticed a different structure on the wall: they explained that it was “to connect computers in a network”.
I thought it was crazy: connecting computers to each other for what?! It was my first contact with one of the greatest revolutions in the history of communication: the internet.
That it manifested itself so early in Impa was no accident. The person responsible for the technology sector at the institute, researcher Jonas Gomes, was part of a group of pioneers led by scientist Tadao Takahashi, who had been thinking about implementing the internet in the country. Jonas brought the discussions to Impa, which ended up being, for more than a decade, the headquarters of the National Education and Research Network (RNP), the organization that created the internet in Brazil.
There were those who defended a closed model for the Brazilian network. It would be consistent with the logic of our telephony, which is totally state-owned. And there were precedents: France had taken the lead with the launch, in the late 1970s, of the Minitel, a successful state-owned system of communication between home terminals over telephone lines.
By 1992, Minitel was in 6.5 million French homes and offered thousands of types of transactions, as well as expanding to other countries. But, unable to evolve properly, ten years later it was already dead. On a visit to the Museum of Arts and Crafts, in Paris, years ago, I explained to my children that that little machine was the internet of old, but they didn’t care.
The fact that Rio de Janeiro hosted the Eco-92 conference, from June 3 to 14, 1992, paved the way for Brazil to enter directly into the open internet era.
The presence of numerous journalists and entities from all over the world required a connection to the international network. Knowing that the state telecommunications system could not provide such access, the organizers negotiated with RNP to create it for the conference, in exchange for donating the necessary equipment. Thus was born, 30 years ago, the first internet network in the country, which connected 11 cities through “backbones” of 64 and 9.6 kb/s and had two 64 kb/s connections with the United States.
Today, the capacity of RNP’s network is more than 1 million times higher, with several points of presence of 100 Gb/s connecting more than 4 million users in universities and research institutes throughout Brazil.
