2012.4.10

Go forward to the Internet, embrace the whole world

In 1980, during my visit to UK, Professor Peter Kirstein of UCL brought us to his laboratory and demonstrated the network between UCL in UK and MIT in USA. Just in several minutes, an electronic mail had been received from MIT over thousands of miles away. In 1983, I had experienced the great effects of the Internet in university teaching & researching management and communication when I traveled to UCLA in USA as a visiting scholar and attended the lectures and speeches given by Dr. Kleinrock. I was deeply inspired by these two visits.

Thirty years ago, the Internet had great development in USA and Europe, but it was almost a blank in China. We have to catch up with them as soon as possible. Go forward to the Internet, embrace the whole world! For achieving this goal, the Internet in China experienced 3 phases in ten years; Building local area network and campus network, Accessing emails which go through the foreign Internet sites, and Building IP network（National Computing and Networking Facility of China, NCFC）with the registration of China’s country code top level domain, CN. All these were prepared for connecting with the international Internet.

Self-reliance and hard working

In early 1980s, China’ economy was very weak, listed in No.5 counting backwards worldwide at 252 U.S. Dollars per capita GDP in 1980. And the communication facilities in China were also out of date, fixed phone popular rate was just 0.43 per hundred persons. Only telephone and fax were available in international communication aspects, and with low speed, high error rate and high cost. There were no public data network before 1987 and the applying procedures of foreign exchanges in purchasing equipment were incredibly complicated. Due to western’s embargo and lacking of foreign exchanges, China’s network construction could only depend on self-reliance and hard working. We designed and built LAN and X.25 node by ourselves, and built campus network. In the other words, we must design and build everything from scratch, including hardware and software. Although people were well trained and dedicated, but what unfortunately was we had no opportunity to make use of those technologies that were very easy to access in the western world.

An opening technical routine of TCP/IP

Network protocol is the core and the key of Internet. China had introduced network equipment and the corresponding SNA and DECNET network software from IBM and DEC, respectively in middle 1980s, and people had getting familiar with them step by step. But the TCP/IP protocol had not been generally adopted in China.

The protocol used in building network is vital in deciding development direction of China's Internet. The designing principle of TCP/IP is open, which is also the main reason why Internet can be so successful today. We adopted the TCP/IP protocol decidedly because we foresaw it would become an indeed international standard and accord with development trend of Internet. We began to build campus network of Tsinghua University (TUNET) in 1987. This is the first campus network that adopted TCP/IP protocol in China. The backbone of NCFC which began to be built in 1989 also adopted TCP/IP. This formed a foundation for smoothly connecting with international Internet in the future.

Great support comes from international friends

There is very close connection between China’s Internet development and the great support given by international friends. At that time, although Europe and American governments enforced embargo in exporting hi-tech products to China, but we still got great support from people and organizations in the Internet community. Korea and Japan are starting relatively early and developing relatively fast in Internet in Asia, friends in these countries also gave us a lots of support. With the support from Karlsruhe University in Germany, ICA (Institute for Computer Application) successfully sent out an Email to Germany. The Email title was "Across the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the world." Professor Zorn Werner and his research team did it by spending 2 years and overcoming many difficulties and risks. The cooperation between High Energy Physics of Chinese Academy of Science and European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the cooperation between Tsinghua University and Canada’s University of British Columbia (UBC), all these cooperation did actively contribution to China’s Internet development. China’s first LAN demonstration(NCFC) was sponsored by World Bank and accomplished under instructions of World Bank experts. When we had some trouble in connecting with Internet, many friends did lots of help to enable China connecting with Internet directly in time.

Although starting late and with weak basis, China’s Internet still gets very big development by thirty years endeavors. By the end of December of 2011, the Netizen in China have exceeded 0.5 billion. International bandwidth achieved 1,389,529Mbps. Network news, ecommerce, instant communication, blog, network video and variety kinds of network applications became popular, and the Internet became an indispensable national information infrastructure for China.