Celebrating 32 years of Philippine Internet, and why we must celebrate with Magoo’s Pizza
Today is the 32nd year since Benjie Tan plugged a cable to connect the Internet to the Philippines. I always make reference to my former colleague, the late Jim Ayson, who pitched a piece that was eventually published on INQ7, the predecessor to this news website. Without him knowing, Jim essentially documented a truly historic moment: the day the Philippines was connected to the Internet for the very first time.
Sadly Jim and Benjie are with us no more, but Jim’s personal blog lives on to tell the tale. He tells the story of how Benjie Tan, an employee of ComNet, had to transport a huge Cisco 7000 router from the ComNet office to PLDT in order to handshake with Sprint in the US. The ordeal ends with him celebrating with Magoo’s Pizza.
An exerpt from his blog post on the Philnet Project can be found below, with a link to his full blog post.
An excerpt
On the evening of March 28, 1994, Benjie flew into Manila back from a business trip in Hong Kong knowing that the hookup between PLDT (the local leased line provider) and Sprint was scheduled to take place that night. It was the last flight out of the then-crown colony. He arrived at the Manila airport at about 11 pm, rushed home to Makati to drop off his things, and then headed out to the ComNet office in Legaspi Village, Makati to await further instructions.
Unfortunately, there was no one in the office, but Benjie sees a note pinned on the wall, written by one of his staff. There’s a checklist of things to do from his boss Gan. He needs to bring over a Cisco 7000 router from the ComNet office and install it in PLDT. Now. There’s also a short apology from his staff. “Sorry sir, we can’t be here to help you because we went home already.” From here on, Benjie is totally on his own. It is now about 11:30 pm.
One of his instructions was to call up the Sprint people in Stockton, California to give them notice that the router would be in place soon and the Internet link would soon be ready to be activated. So Benjie makes the long distance call, introduces himself, and tells the Sprint guys to be ready in about an hour and a half.
There’s a problem though. The Cisco 7000 router needs to be transported. It’s about the size of a small filing cabinet and won’t fit in his car trunk. It’s also very expensive equipment, costing around $70,000 and paid for by Philippine taxpayers with a DOST grant, so one needs to be extra careful about this piece of hardware. Benjie goes for the “Humpty Dumpty” approach and proceeds to take it apart so it’ll fit in his car, with the intention of re-assembling it at PLDT.
“I knew it wouldn’t fit into the trunk,” he remembers. “So all I could do was try to lighten the load.”
You can read the full account on Jim’s blog.