Kanchana Kanchanasut
loreThe computer scientist credited with bringing the internet to Thailand, and with obtaining the country's domain.
Securing a country-code domain sounds administrative and is closer to foundational: it is the point at which a country stops being a set of hosts inside somebody else's namespace and becomes an addressable place with its own registry, its own policy and its own dispute over who runs it. Nearly every national internet story in this catalogue has that moment in it, and it is almost always accomplished by one or two academics doing paperwork nobody else understood the importance of.
Also known as: kanchanasut, thailand internet, .th
Sources
- Internet Hall of Fame inductee page: she set up her nation's first experimental domestic research and education network in 1988, connecting five Thai universities by dial-up to the Australian Academic and Research Network, and registered the .TH domain, which she has administered since 1988; in 1991 her efforts led to the first leased line with a TCP/IP connection to the global network
- Internet history timeline: through the work of Dr Kanchana Kanchanasut, Thailand obtained its own domain name