by admin | Mar 29, 2014 | Tech Updates
By: Jerome Auza The Internet seems to be a natural thing nowadays but for the pioneers, 20 years after the first time the country was officially connected to the Internet via selected colleges and universities, those times were unforgettable. I consider myself lucky being one of the pioneers at the University of San Carlos – Talamban Campus when I was a fourth year college student taking electronics and communications engineering. Back then, getting hold of a technical book at the library is just like winning the lottery. You’d be lucky to be able to borrow a book about programming or software development. You are competing for a few books with an army of hundreds of students. At that time, the USC-TC organized its Center for Network Management and Services which essentially was the implementing arm of the university for the PHNet project (http://www.ph.net/about.html). I volunteered to do something on the UNIX server which was a computer only a handful of students would ever have access at that time. If you were somehow involved in the PHNet project, chances are you may have seen an email from me which was adm@durian.usc.edu.ph at that time. We named our servers at USC-TC after fruit trees. The center has one of the largest bandwidths available at that time: 64kbps! And there were dial-up users who were so happy at one time when we upgraded their modem connections to 14.4kbps from 9.6kbps. My main job was to monitor the usage and provide utilization reports of the modems. At that time, you had a limited set of programming languages available: C language and some scripting...
