A brief history of the internet: my version

It's nice to know that my webpage from 1995 has been preserved. See it here.

The webpage was part of the website of the GOIT-7 and was hosted by GSILink. GSILink was the pioneering commercial internet provider in Cebu. It was started by Alan Young, Gerald Sta. Ana and, oops sorry I cannot remember two of the other people behind it. But one became the wife of Alan.

But even before GSILink there was Nexus Online of Alex Yap. One of the programmers of Alex went over to GSILink because Nexus failed to take off commercially although it was lucky enough to have plenty of telephone lines most probably courtesy of his wife's being employed by PLDT at the time.

I should explain the words in bold above. In those days if you wanted to connect to the internet you need to dial to your ISP. The 28KBPS modems ruled. Lynx was the only way to connect to the web when you use Nexus. Later however, GSILink showed the visual world of Netscape.

There was no Globe Tel yet so PLDT had the monopoly and did not care if you waited very long for your own phone line. It was the time when Lee Kuan Yew announced that in the Philippines 50% (I cannot remember the figure) were waiting for their telephones to be installed while the rest was waiting for the dial tone. Ironically he was speaking in the Philippines as a guest of PLDT.

The two internet providers connected to the internet via the bandwidth of University of San Carlos whose internet brain was Manman Kintanar and his students. Manman and his group also did the LAN, it was token ring at the time, of our office under contract of Tony Zosa.

Those were the days!

Twilight is the culprit

All books coming to the Philippines are now taxed because of this book. A top official of the Philippine Customs says the book is not educational according to their newest interpretation of the 1950 Florence Agreement.

I think the customs official does not read books at all. Or she has no teenage children or else they would feed her to the vampires.

I am often frustrated that my daughters do not read the books on my shelf which I heartily recommend especially the books by Dawkins. Or the science fiction of Asimov, Clarke or Brin. My son has read the Foundation series of Asimov but he has not lifted the cover of the Eternal Golden Braid.

If it is any consolation, my younger daughter is now reading because of Twilight. Hopefully she'll graduate to serious stuff soon. The older one recently graduated from college. Alas, all she has read are the Potter series and now this Twilight and its sequels.

Sometimes in my desperation I think our Customs should ban all books of the Twilight genre. I am kidding, of course, because I do enjoy fiction like the Potter books.