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12 Years of Internet in the Philippines

Abe Olandres Editor-in-chief March 29, 2006 · 1 min read

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12 years of intenet in the Philippines and a lot has changed since then…

Might first encounter with the internet was in my freshmen years in Ateneo. Students are issued their own university emails in the form of [email protected]. We use pine to access our emails and we were given computer cards worth around 50 hours of internet use in the Faura computer labs.

Google wasn’t born yet so I guess I was more familiar with the likes of Yahoo & MSN. Hence my oldest existing email was from Yahoo and I started to using emails to reach my high school friends.

In the following years, fewer and fewer mails arrive in the mail box and most of the birthday greetings I get are thru my email already. I thought that was the end of the pen and paper.

While Migs reminisce “Blast from the 2000 Past” and the Filipino millionaires of Web 1.0, Marc is currently at PICS party talking about SEM.

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Abe Olandres

Editor-in-chief

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and is considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines.

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32 Comments

Malcolm · 12 years ago

Excellent article. I definitely appreciate
this site. Stick with it!

eleonora · 12 years ago

I am in fact thankful to the holder of this site who has shared this
wonderful article at here.

Vanessa · 15 years ago

talaga lang ha? i remember having dial-up internet at around 1993… so that would make it 18 years already.
MS-DOS, Yahoo, and floppy disks pa lang ginagamit to save files. hehehe… reminiscing.

Kramolop · 16 years ago

Down memory lane, at UPLB we too were very fortunate to have a taste of cyberspace in 1994, I credit my Professor Dr. Tony Moran for introducing me to cybernetics, online, research and all that stuff that would become the internet as we know it. Mudspring was our email and we would access the net using archie and veronica protocols, our monitors were the green ones, then we moved to colored ones (gray scale images), then netscape and mosaic were introduced!

I did my thesis about the internet. whenever I go back to the UPLB DevCom library I still check out my thesis just to see if students still use it, or find it amusing to read: “Pattern of Internet Access @mudspring.edu.ph” that was its title.

John · 16 years ago

I got this from http://www.msc.edu.ph/wired/timeline.html

March 29, 1994
**The first Philippine link to the Internet at the first International E- mail conference in USC, Cebu

Long · 17 years ago

Yes it was 1994. There were informal ways before but the formal connection was done through a local consortium, forgot the name but i think the holder of the .ph was one of that. It was a group of academe (AdMU), government agencies, like DOST and DTI among others. The initial test was not tha tinteresting as it was just like a BBC. Then the web browsers came (Netscape). I was working in DTI- IT then so we were part of the first group that were given access. In fact my first website was done 1995….

Ichigo · 18 years ago

I think it’s on MAy 1994 that the internet here at the Philippines occured..

Lloyd Pino · 19 years ago

Wow!!!!! That long? Thanks for the info guys… Well, my first stint on internet was i think 1995… On a 386 machine. My first e-mail then was Edsa Mail; what ever happened to them? Then of course Yahoo. I don’t seem to remember the server, but, hey! Now is DSL and Broadband!!!!

Dj Ash 1983 · 19 years ago

Hmm….. never thought the internet started in 1994. My first taste of surfing the web was the time I’m in 2nd year high school…. that was way back in 1997. I’m using netscape that time.

Oh yeah, I’m making a term paper for our english class. This article helps me a lot, so I give my thanks to the blogger.

Umm…. can you guys help me find websites regarding internet cafe history in the philippines? Thanks in advance. :D

Noemi Dado · 20 years ago

I didn’t even know it started 12 years ago. I started in 1995 so that means my online existence is 11 years. I wrote about it here

Speaking of Ateneo, I am so disappointed that their computer technology is not in par with other top schools like UP and La Salle. I pay so much tuition (at least 50thousand a sem) for my daughter and still they haven’t fixed their online registration. Buti pa ang UP, they enlist online and just go to school to pay their tuition (only 6-7th a sem).

Abe Olandres Editor-in-chief · 20 years ago

My first 5 years experience with the internet was exclusive to the confines of AdMU. My first IM was ICQ, my first email was Yahoo, and IRC was the best place to download mp3 for the ubercool WinAmp. Uy, Sonique player rocks too!

jobert · 20 years ago

I remember PC Magazine’s BBS site years ago. That was around 1992 or so witha 14.4kpbs dial up modem . Although I guess everyone jumped on the wagon with those 33or so kbpses…

As for the internet here…. hmmm… that was around 1994 or 95? No wait… that was before Windows 95 so I’d say 94. I remember downloading Win95 from Webquest. Wow. 12 years…

I forgot the ISP it was Phil something… Afterwards, I used Webquest, Infocom then Pacific.

Horatio B. Bogbindero · 20 years ago

Interestingly enough. The Ateneo (among) many other schools were one of the first to get Internet access. Of course, the original one was email relaying via dial-up to an Australian University with an Internet pipe at that time.

Of course, the hardware of the time was mostly DOST-donated DEC Alpha machines (Balut, Pusit, etc …) running OSF Unix. Open source software packages being used at that time were Sendmail, Bind, wu-ftpd and Apache. Of course, as yuga mentions, the not-so-open-source pine email client.

jhay · 20 years ago

12 yrs na pala ang internet sa Pinas. Honestly, ngayon ko lang nalaman ito. :D

jangelo · 20 years ago

Check out yet another one of my blasts from the past:

http://jangelo.i.ph/blogs/jangelo/index.php?item=blast-from-the-past-the-alpha-centauri-web-pages

Miguel · 20 years ago

In 1995, Yahoo was a directory, and MSN was not on the Internet – Microsoft wanted to build its own online service, much like AOL and Compuserve at that time.

For a search index, the players at that time were AltaVista, Lycos, and maybe Excite.

I’ll be doing more reminiscing on my blog about pieces of Internet history that have never been published. Some bits came out in the recent PLUG thread, The Role of Linux/Open Source in Bringing Internet to the Philippines.