Jun Murai
lorenetworking
The Keio professor who built Japan's first inter-university network in 1984 and the research consortium that followed it.
JUNET came first, then WIDE, which carried the country's first real internet traffic over leased lines. The detail worth keeping is the route: Japan's international link to the United States was established through Hawaii, with help from the University of Hawaii - the same institution that had put a packet radio network across four islands thirteen years earlier because it could not lay cable. The place that solved its own isolation ended up being how somebody else's was solved.
Also known as: murai, junet, wide project, internet samurai
Sources
- Internet Hall of Fame: known as the father of the Internet in Japan and, outside Japan, as the Internet samurai; in 1984 he developed JUNET, the first inter-university network in the country, and in 1988 founded the WIDE Project
- Asia Internet History: Murai initiated the WIDE project in 1987 as a joint project between universities and industrial research laboratories, the first true Internet in Japan using TCP/IP over leased lines, with an international link to the US established through Hawaii with substantial help from Toben Nielsen at the University of Hawaii