The people behind South Africa’s earliest pre-Internet connections

When it comes to the pioneers who brought the Internet to South Africa, few names carry as much weight as industry legend Mike Lawrie.

In 1988, Lawrie led an informal team at Rhodes University that used donated equipment to salvage their own Internet gateway.

The team attempted their first TCP/IP connection in 1990, linking computers at Rhodes and the University of Cape Town via Uninet.

By 1991, the first international TCP/IP connection was made between Rhodes and the home of Randy Bush in Portland, Oregon.

While Lawrie and his team’s contributions to the early Internet have been thoroughly documented, there are other parts of this history and the individuals who made it happen that aren’t as well-known.

According to one pioneer’s account, South Africa actually owes much to the direct involvement of one of the fathers of the Internet, Vint Cerf.

Cerf co-developed the TCP/IP standard with Bob Kahn in the 1970s as part of research funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

In 1974, a delegation from the United States, including Cerf, visited South Africa to demonstrate and possibly convince the country to join its Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET).

Cerf recounted the event when he visited South Africa again in 2013 and gave an informal talk and Q&A session at JoziHub.

In the audience that day was Gerrit Dirk “Gert” van der Veer, who Cerf called on to tell his side of the story.

Later in his career, Van der Veer would become CEO of SAA. However, in 1974 he was but a humble engineer at the South African Railways department.

Van der Veer explained that back then, the old Department of Posts and Communications prohibited all third-party transmissions over its leased lines.

However, the South African Railways and Harbours Administration had its own telecommunications infrastructure, which it allowed the Americans to use for their ARPANET demo.

“We used this meeting to demonstrate the ARPANET’s capabilities to the head of the Post Office, with Vint and Koos Koen in attendance, and we told him what the future would look like,” Van der Veer said.

“That led to the Post Office Act being changed so that data networks could start, and you were allowed to share lines and network packets. We have Vint Cerf to thank for that.”

Cerf said his goal with the demo was to get South Africa to think about the future of telecommunications.

“There was a small group of people from Joburg who participated in the demo who saw 40 years into the future in some sense,” he said.

“I had always hoped this would trigger some serious thinking and the evolution of networking in this country.”

Another under-documented aspect of South African computer networking is the advent of Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) and their roles in sending the first emails over the Rhodes University Internet link.

Before the widespread adoption of TCP/IP and the ARPANET giving way to what would become the Internet, computer hobbyists used all kinds of tricks to communicate globally.

The largest of these systems was FidoNet, developed by Tom Jennings between 1983 and 1984.

These systems worked by calling one another directly over regular telephone lines to exchange data.

FidoNet saw significant uptake among South African computer users in the 1980s.

Among those who adopted the technology was the Anglican Church, which decided to fund the development of a South African BBS to counteract Apartheid-era censorship and misinformation spread by state-owned media.

Stewart Ting Chong joined Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s staff in 1987 to set up CPSANet. CPSA is an acronym for the Church of the Province of Southern Africa, the formal name for the Anglican Church of Southern Africa.

The photo at the top of the article shows Tutu and Ting Chong at a restaurant in the United States several years ago.

In an email to University of Pretoria researcher (now professor) Christo Lombaard in 2001, Ting Chong confirmed that part of the purpose of the BBS was to circulate Tutu’s statements directly with CPSA bishops.

This was so they could confidently answer church members’ questions about them.

“At the time, the Anglican Church had contracted with a small company to set up one-to-one email and file transfers using direct dialling,” Ting Chong said.

“At that stage, 20 megabyte hard drives and 64k RAM with a 1200 bits per second modem was the high-tech stuff. By the end of ’87, I had developed a BBS on a 286 PC with a 2400 bps modem.”

Ting Chong also related one incident where the system was used to send emails to the United States after Tutu was arrested for participating in a protest march in Cape Town that the government had declared illegal.

“The Episcopal church in New York City had set up a 24-hour monitoring system to pick up any email that I sent on the day of the march,” said Ting Chong.

“From there, messages would be sent via email or fax to the whole of the Anglican Communion as well as other high-profile persons.”

After sending the first emails detailing what had happened, Ting Chong said it was probably 30 minutes before former president PW Botha was receiving faxes from all over the world condemning the arrests.

Lawrie and his team at Rhodes University also first set up FidoNet services for universities in 1988 — three years before the first TCP/IP connection was up and running.

Anriette Esterhuysen, another South African computer networking pioneer and 2013 Internet Hall of Fame Global Connector inductee, was involved with getting people connected to BBSes in the 1980s.

She joined the South African Council of Churches in 1987, which initially used the Anglican Church’s BBS for email.

However, they later moved to WorkNet, which soon became the SA NGO Network (SANGONet). WorkNet was set up by trade unionist and later Wits University professor Taffy Adler.

Esterhuysen explained that Randy Bush, who would help Lawrie’s team set up the first TCP/IP link to his home in the United States, also supported the work of SANGONeT.

“We collaborated with Randy Bush and others to provide email and other forms of connectivity — like early search engines WAIS and Gopher — to African universities,” she said.

SANGONet connected universities in some countries, like Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, while Rhodes University helped others.

“We all collaborated and Mike Lawrie was a great connector. He gave us at SANGONet a Uninet leased line even though we were not an academic institution,” said Esterhuysen.