Vendor lineage
Petrobras - the network that follows the oil
State oil company created in 1953, and one of the largest private networks in the country.
Petroleo Brasileiro S.A. was created by Law 2.004 of 3 October 1953, which also established the state monopoly over exploration, refining and transport - a monopoly that was not in the original bill and was added during almost twenty-two months of passage through Congress.
It appears on this timeline for a reason that has nothing to do with oil: an operation of this shape is one of the hardest networking problems in any country. Offshore platforms are remote sites with no alternative route, refineries are industrial control environments where a network change can stop a physical process, and the seismic processing behind exploration is high-performance computing at national scale.
The 1997 petroleum law ended the legal monopoly and opened the industry to other companies constituted under Brazilian law, which changed what the company had to be. A monopoly builds infrastructure to serve itself; a competitor builds it to be cheaper than someone else's.
For engineers the interesting inheritance is the mix. Corporate networks, industrial systems that predate the internet, satellite and subsea links to platforms, and research computing all belong to the same organisation and the same policy - which is the setting where the argument between [security and availability](/learn/security-versus-availability) stops being abstract, because taking a control the wrong way costs production rather than convenience.
- Lei 2.004 of 3 October 1953 (Wikipedia, with the text of article 1): created Petroleo Brasileiro S.A. and the state monopoly over exploration, refining and transport
- Fundacao Getulio Vargas, Atlas Historico: the bill spent almost 22 months in Congress and the monopoly was added during passage, not proposed
- Wikipedia - Petrobras: founded 3 October 1953, headquartered in Rio de Janeiro, production of about 3.4 million barrels of oil equivalent per day (2023)