Ira Fuchs
lorenetworking
The CUNY administrator who built the academic network for everyone the ARPANET had left out, starting with one link to Yale in 1981.
He gave the motive himself, without dressing it up: he was envious of ARPANET users. The ARPANET served defence-funded mathematics and physics, and the rest of the university - the humanities, the liberal arts, everyone without the right grant - had nothing. So he built a network whose entry condition was that you agree to connect the next institution along. It reached 1,400 universities in 49 countries and was the first academic network to reach Japan, Israel, the USSR and most of western Europe. The name began as Because It’s There and became Because It’s Time, he said, because it sounded better. And the origin is the detail worth keeping: he traced the whole idea to being a teenager with a ham radio in Queens, talking to strangers across the world from his bedroom - the same article of faith, applied to institutions instead of individuals.
Also known as: fuchs, bitnet, because it's time network
Sources
- Internet Hall of Fame, 2017 inductee: co-founder of BITNET, a cooperative network between the City University of New York and Yale that provided email, file transfer and instant messaging to faculty, researchers and students worldwide in the early 1980s; in his induction interview Fuchs said plainly that he was envious of ARPANET users
- Internet Hall of Fame: Fuchs's interest began as a teenage ham radio operator in Queens, and he described connecting the scholars of the world as a natural extension of that; the network grew to 1,400 universities in 49 countries
- BITNET founded 1981 by Fuchs at CUNY and Greydon Freeman at Yale, the first link being between the two; it was the first academic network to connect the United States to Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Israel, the USSR and most of western Europe