Re: 2011/11/24 - 20th Anniversary of Internet in South Africa

Yes indeed it was a fantastic time.

It is most interesting to read things from the students perspective.

As I said earlier our problems were that not being an "open" based 
campus we were still heavily dependent on the IBM mainframes and very 
limited network capacity via Potch to Rhodes and then out.    I think if 
was 9.6 Kb line at that stage but I really cannot remember.

The academic imperative of access to the Internet was still a long way 
in the future and, in general terms, apart from Computer Sc and 
Electrical Engineering there was no understanding at all of what was to 
come.

It was interesting because I was hired into a pure IBM shop where 
University management was resisting pressure from amongst others Prof 
Hugh Hanrehan in Electrical Engineering and some, by no means all, of 
the Computer Scientists to change our policies.  In fact at my interview 
Hugh asked me my views on platform standards and the DVC to whom I 
reported, Jerry Steele who had been the second Director of the Computer 
Centre following Mikes boss at Rhodes Prof Henderson, said he expected 
to find my staff in protest marches as I made changes.   That didn't 
happen but I did loose some very competent senior staff along the way.

IBM and Microsoft didn't believe it but change was on the way.

We installed our first general purpose SUN machine some time in the 
middle 90s which helped but the conversion to on campus TCP/IP took a 
long time.   The network remained unstable for a long time and I 
remember being horrified while driving to work to hear one of our 
astronomy Profs talking on morning radio about how he had watched a 
particular lunar experience from his office over night via an 
observatory in Hawaii over the Internet.  He had not informed anyone 
that he was to do this or requested that we provide support staff to 
keep it all up and running.  The realisation struck at that point that 
the Internet was being seen as an available tool like electricity and 
just had to be there.  This was no longer an academic experiment for a 
few computer scientists and engineers.  (I think it was Shoemaker-Levy 
hitting  Jupiter in July 1994 but I really can't remember)

To get back to student views.  It always pained me to be restrictive of 
what students could or could not do.  The IBM mainframes were, to put in 
mildly, somewhat overloaded and technologically not best suited to 
e-mail/news/browsing applications.  It was a perpetual balancing act.

In later years I was under great pressure to censor access and limit 
what could be read or not.  All ways against censorship, my response to 
the VC was that unless you could restrict access to all but historians 
wanting to see information about breast plates or medics wanting to 
study current papers on some of their topics, this really was 
impractical.  In my view it remains so but fortunately I no longer make 
those kinds of decisions.    I also felt that banning access to Playboy 
and similar sites would only encourage the kind of action Zane referred 
to, while leaving those sites available would result in an initial 
flurry followed by boredom and the greater pressure of getting work 
done.  We were after all dealing with adults and generally speaking not 
school kids. My statistics showed that this was in fact true and during 
my time the only sites we ever restricted access to were radio stations 
streaming and chat rooms because each required dedicated sessions.  This 
was only to preserve bandwidth although sometimes students/staff didn't 
see it that way.

Of course the paedophile and similar sites were still in the future.

In my initial post I referred to the challenges we had in managing the 
Internet as it emerged.  Network capacity was always a serious challenge 
although it eased a bit once we were able to get direct access to the 
gateway router at Rhodes without going via the IBM based systems at Potch.

All in all when I see what some of our students, and my staff, of that 
era have achieved I am immensely pleased to have been part of it even if 
most of my battles were at political and managerial levels rather than 
technical.  University and Telkom both feature high in my memories and 
not always positively.

I never did learn the art of being popular!

Inter-connectedly

Henry


On 2011/11/20 08:54 AM, Mike Lawrie wrote:
> Zane Wilson wrote
>> On 19/11/2011 22:54, Graham Leggett wrote:
>>> On 19 Nov 2011, at 9:58 PM, Henry Watermeyer wrote:
>>>
>>>>   Our undergraduates learned well and a group of them went off to 
>>>> start
>>>>   Internet Solutions.   Far sighted indeed.
>>>
>>> In the early nineties Wits undergraduates were not allowed access to 
>>> the internet at all, and nothing motivates like the forbidden.
>> I still remember the time in 1992 I was called into Henry's office to 
>> be chastised for accessing a Usenet newsgroup and sending email to a 
>> fellow
>
> There were different approaches to Internet usage at the different 
> universities. At
> Rhodes, I took the approach that no student was going to be able to 
> say "I was not
> allowed to use the network." The computer labs were opened 24/7, many 
> students
> were in nearby residences, and the network performed better in the 
> small hours of
> the morning. The labs were fairly busy. Also, the PCs would be 
> obsolete before
> they were worn out, and the network costs did not increase with usage.
>
> Make no mistake, this approach led to headaches, but for sure it 
> generated
> a set of computer-competent graduates (and dropouts). I recall being 
> asked by some
> academic staff to limit student access. Those staff were concerned 
> (with some
> justification) that the network was too much of a distraction for the 
> students and that
> their studies were being adversely affected. I resisted this.
>
> I also had to find ways to live with the students who pushed out the 
> envelope. I don't
> doubt this was a major contribution in keeping Rhodes at the 
> forefront. There were
> very few cases of abuse -- maybe because our detection was not good 
> enough, but I
> prefer to think otherwise. The majority of the students appeared to 
> recognise that there
> was far more value to having a working system than a hacked one, so I 
> suspect that
> self-policing played a major role.
>
> It was a fantastic time.
>
> Mike Lawrie
> Former IT Director, Rhodes University
>
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> .
>

-- 

/Play croquet at Zoo Lake./

/To find out more contact me or visit WWW.croquet.org.za/

Henry Watermeyer

Box 89 1142 Lyndhurst, 2106, South Africa

Phone (+27) [0] 84 800 8862

Home and fax (+27) [0] 11-882-7251

Skype: Henry.Watermeyer

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