Early Internet days

I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog that I signed up for a Jaring account sometime in 1992 or 1993, but I hadn’t been able to pin down the exact year. It was all too long ago, and I’d kept no written record. So unlike me! But then, just a few days ago, I stumbled upon an old story I’d written for my chess column in The Star, dated 28 December 1995. In that piece, I had casually remarked that it was “now close to two years since I began surfing the Net.” That line helped jog my memory: I must have applied for my Jaring account sometime in 1993, and the informal North Malaysia Internet Society (NOMIS) came into being a year later.

Early 1993 was also when I began reconnecting with some of my old schoolmates. One of them told me he was using the computer network at the University of Science Malaysia to access newsgroups and communicate with people abroad. That fascinated me. I’d already been exposed to the idea of long-distance data transmission while working at Ban Hin Lee Bank in the mid-1980s. Back then, I was helping to set up the ATM Centre. Though I wasn’t a techie, sitting through meetings with programmers and system analysts gave me a decent grasp of how data could travel through telephone lines. We were working on computerising bank services as far back as 1983, and I was familiar with the idea of sending strings of information down a wire.

Around that same time, a colleague had passed me a copy of The Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll, a thrilling account of how a hacker from across the world was infiltrating American university networks. That book made a lasting impression. So when my friend told me that he could send emails and participate in USENET discussions simply by having his desktop computer dial a local number into the university system through a modem, I was intrigued.

Not long after, he handed me an application form for Jaring, which was then operated by MIMOS. I was excited, but applying wasn’t as straightforward as it sounds. I needed approval from someone at the bank. Trust MIMOS to include that layer of bureaucratic approval, even for private individuals like me! So I approached my Senior Manager, prepared for a round of puzzled questions. Back in 1993, the Internet was practically unknown to 99.99 percent of Malaysians. But after some explanation, he signed off on my application. Phew!

The timing turned out to be fortunate. As secretary of the Penang Chess Association, I was due to accompany our team to the annual Merdeka Team Championships in Kuala Lumpur. While they competed, I submitted my form to MIMOS, along with the RM350 fee: RM300 for the annual dial-up subscription, and RM50 for processing. A few weeks later, my Jaring account came through. I was user number 321-5, the "5" here being the check digit. At that time, there were fewer than 350 Internet users in the entire country. I suppose that made me something of a pioneer.

My first modem was a borrowed, portable unit that plugged into the back of the desktop and ran at a sluggish 300bps. Eventually, I bought a more decent internal card that could do 14.4kbps. I still remember the sound of the modem connecting—the chirps, whines and crackles, all signalling that I was about to tap into the wider world. It was painfully slow by today’s standards. Browsing the worldwide web tested patience, and I learned to do more with less. But even at that speed, it opened up a new world right from my home.

Telekom Malaysia charged 13 sen per local call back then, regardless of duration. Later, they switched to four sen per minute, but Jaring negotiated a special 1511 dial-up number at just 1.5 sen per minute. Telekom eventually launched its own TM Net service in 1996 via the 1515 number.

With my new account, I immediately began exploring the Internet for chess-related content for my newspaper column. I started following international discussions, made contacts like Mark Crowther from the UK and Sam Sloan from the US, and pulled in material that otherwise would have taken weeks to arrive by post, if at all.

Then in February 1994, shortly after Chinese New Year, a group of local Internet enthusiasts gathered at the YMCA in Penang. That meeting led to the formation of NOMIS. We came from different backgrounds but shared the same curiosity and excitement. For several years, NOMIS was invited to computer fairs in Penang to demonstrate how to get online. We gave talks, set up booths, showed people how the web worked, and most of them were seeing it for the first time.

Looking back now, those really were the good old days of the Internet in Malaysia. We were explorers, figuring things out together, one dial-up connection at a time. The Internet is now so commonplace that we take it for granted, but there was a time, not that long ago, when the idea of communicating instantly with someone on the other side of the world felt nothing short of magical.