Ira Fuchs @ BITNET: The Administrator Who Connected the Scholars of the World

The Internet is so ubiquitous that it's easy to forget the network didn't spring into being, fully formed, as a global connectivity paradigm. But, of course, that's not the case. Our collective journey toward having the Internet (almost) everywhere was a slow process that took decades.

Part of the reason the Internet took so long to spread was cultural. While, today, people take things like email and instant messaging for granted, that wasn’t always the case. Even though most of us couldn’t effectively operate in our day-to-day lives without email, that type of digital dependency is a learned behavior. For thousands of years, humans survived perfectly well without it, and convincing us we needed our email accounts attached to our hips at all times took a while.

That began to change thanks to Ira Fuchs and BITNET. BITNET played a critical role in convincing people they needed networked computers. And, like most computer innovation at the time, it began at universities.

When Ira started BITNET, his goal was to “connect the scholars of the world.” He launched it in 1981 with a connection between the City University of New York -- CUNY -- and Yale University. Within months, Ira had connected major institutions up and down the eastern United States. Soon thereafter he’d expanded to the West Coast. Within two years of launching, BITNET was in Europe, then the Middle East, Japan, and, eventually, even into Soviet Russia, making BITNET the global computer network that preceded the Internet.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.