The man who connected Malaysia

It all began quietly in 1983. In a lab at Universiti Malaya, Dr Mohamed Awang-Lah, then head of the university’s computer centre, was already thinking several steps ahead of everyone else. Even then, he could see the potential for Malaysia to connect with the rest of the world through emerging computer networks. It was still the pre-Internet era, and most people were just trying to get their heads around floppy disks and dot matrix printers.

He collaborated with institutions in Canada and the United States, laying down a skeleton framework for early data exchange. By the late 1980s, he had helped establish RangKoM (Rangkaian Komputer Malaysia), a government-supported academic network linking research institutes and public universities. It relied on clunky X.25 lines and primitive routing, but it worked. RangKoM proved that a national academic network was possible, and laid the foundation for something more ambitious.

That came in 1992, when Malaysia’s first full-fledged Internet service provider, JARING, was launched. Dr Awang-Lah was its founding director, and it was run under the wing of MIMOS, the Malaysian Institute of Microelectronic Systems. The name stood for “Joint Advanced Research Integrated Networking,” but more importantly, it marked the country's formal entry into the global Internet community. JARING replaced RangKoM by absorbing its infrastructure and extending services to the public.

In its first year, JARING had only about 200 users. These were not casual consumers but mostly academics, tech hobbyists and engineers willing to pay RM50 a month for access to text-based services like Telnet, FTP and Gopher. Everything was dial-up. Everything was slow. But it was the Internet, and we were on it.

Help was hard to come by, which made JARING’s early outreach stand out. There was a JARING newsgroup on the Usenet, where people could ask questions, air grievances or simply learn from each other. Occasionally, Dr Mohamed Awang-Lah himself would appear in the thread to offer replies that were calm, detailed and technically sound. It was a rare thing: the head of an organisation engaging directly with end users on a public forum. It made an impression.

So did their technical support. In the mid-1990s, when dial-up modems were still temperamental and drivers didn't always play nice with your desktop computer, JARING technicians made house calls. I once had the benefit of this in Penang. A young technician came over all the way from KL, traced the problem, fixed it and stayed long enough to show me how to troubleshoot in the future. It felt like being part of a quiet, growing movement.

By the late 1990s, JARING was no longer just a research backbone. It had become the primary commercial ISP in the country. Other service providers leased bandwidth from JARING. They introduced higher-speed dial-ups, leased lines for businesses, and eventually even international Internet gateways. For a brief but significant window, JARING was the Internet in Malaysia.

That changed in 1996, when Telekom Malaysia launched TM Net. Backed by greater resources, a nationwide telephone infrastructure, and a massive marketing budget, TM Net quickly captured the mass market. JARING, still operating under MIMOS, struggled to keep up. It had the engineering talent but not the commercial muscle. The difference in user support was stark: JARING remained deeply technical, while TM Net courted the masses.

Still, JARING held on. It rolled out broadband, hosted servers, introduced VOIP services and continued serving corporations and niche users who valued reliability over flash. But the ground was shifting. In 2013, the government handed JARING over to a private entity, Utusan Printcorp, in an effort to revive or reposition it. That, unfortunately, never materialised.

The irony was that JARING had always been ahead of its time. It introduced video-on-demand and broadband services before Malaysians were ready to embrace them. But without control over national infrastructure, it couldn’t scale fast enough to compete.

By 2015, JARING was no more. The company went into liquidation. Domain names were deactivated. Servers shut down. Email accounts disappeared. The digital bridge that had once carried Malaysia’s first Internet packets quietly faded out of existence. And with that, the country’s Internet pioneer bowed out and left behind a legacy that many now overlook.

But for many of us, JARING represented something special. It wasn’t just an Internet provider. It was a pioneer, built by visionaries, and run by engineers who believed in the mission. It was where we learned how the Internet worked, where we got our first static IP, where we discovered how to access a world that was slowly coming online and through it all, there was Dr Mohamed Awang-Lah—calm, firm and deeply committed to the idea that Malaysia deserved a place in the global digital conversation.

He didn’t just connect us to the Internet. He connected us to each other.