SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, & MATHEMATICS SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, & MATHEMATICS Get set, Internet Michael Nowlan, co-founder IEunet and former college Director of IT Services, looks back to 1991 when Trinity became the first organisation in Ireland to connect to the internet On 17 June 1991, Telecom É ireann agreed to deliver a leased line to a new campus company, IEunet, based in the O’Reilly Institute, and with that Trinity became the first organisation in Ireland to connect to ‘the internet’ - a word and concept still only being used by computer programmers that had yet to go mainstream. I co-founded IEunet with Cormac Callanan, a Trinity postgrad who was lecturing in DIT at the time. At this stage there was the beginning of a buzz about the potential of the internet and businesses wanted to get access to international email to communicate with colleagues outside Ireland. This was when phone calls were expensive so you didn’t just pick up the phone and have a chat with someone in the US for an hour. By June 1991, after a lot of late nights and early mornings, we could physically connect to another computer on the other side of the globe. The connection went from Trinity to Canterbury (in Kent) to Amsterdam, and then to the rest of the world using a 19.2 Kbs line (yes, we were only working in kilobits). IEunet paid Trinity rent for space in the O’Reilly Institute, and electricity was included although at one point I thought we might be using more electricity than the rent would cover… Two days after IEunet completed the commissioning of the internet connection, I sent an email announcing the arrival of the Internet in Ireland and inviting staff to test the new connection. I guess it’s the first group email sent in college. Aware of the fragility of the connection, I wrote: ‘No gaurantees [sic] of reliable service are offered at present, it is quite likely that the line will go down at no notice.’ I still laugh every time I see the misspelling - an augury of textspelling perhaps! There was enormous support for what we were doing from all staff and students, but particularly from the Head of computer science, Professor John Byrne. It was a lot of hard work for the team and I did ask my wife if it would be okay to invest a few hundred pounds in this project while saying that the internet would be the next big thing. It was a really great time for innovation and entrepreneurship at Trinity. The first invoice that IEunet issued to a paying customer was to another Trinity start-up, middleware developer IONA Technologies, which went on to become the first Irish company to float on NASDAQ. Like Siemens and other research-based computer companies, IONA Technologies used our services because it was the only way they could get access to the internet at that time. For a brief period, we felt we had a monopoly but of course that never lasts too long. In general it was a bit of a hand to mouth operation where plenty of customers went bust and left us holding the debt. John Byrne, Cormac and myself were the Directors of the company and that continued until I took a step back to become Director of what are now the college IT services. I spent the bulk of my working life at Trinity until I retired in 2007. It was a great place to be. I have fond memories of the staff lunch room which was a fantastic place to meet poets, language scholars, scientists and engineers, and of the benches in College Park which were always a great place to sit and watch Dubliners as they came through the city. Walking around campus is something I enjoyed but some days it would take me nearly an hour to get from Front Gate to Westland Row, not because I was a slow walker but because I met so many people to chat to along the way. Those were the early heady days of the internet. We had no clue what it would turn into and there was only excitement, no fear. IEunet enjoyed a modest success: after moving off campus, it was bought by a consortium, then sold to ESAT and eventually bought by BT. Today 91% of people in Ireland are internet users. Each person with a smartphone has faster internet speed in their pocket now than we had using expensive college computers in the ‘90s. We had no idea that this would happen - I wish we had, because we would be extremely wealthy by now! I believe that computing will continue to become ever faster and more powerful and that the impact the internet has on our lives is only set to deepen. Can you imagine what the pandemic would have been like without online? The whole world of work has changed and the foundation of that is the internet.
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