Piet Beertema
lorenetworking
System administrator at Amsterdam's Mathematical Centre who ran the machine at the junction of European network traffic, registered .nl, and on 17 November 1988 at 2:28 in the afternoon received the message that put Europe on the internet.
He met his first computer at the aerospace laboratory in 1965, joined the Mathematical Centre in 1966 and never left. The machine he ran there, mcvax, was the junction through which most of Europe's mail and news passed to and from America, which made him the person who registered .nl in 1986 and, after years of preparation, the one who received the confirmation on 17 November 1988 that the institute was on the American research network - the first institution outside North America, a short while after INRIA in France. The other thing he is remembered for happened four years earlier and says something about the network he ran. On 1 April 1984, seven months after a Korean airliner had been shot down, he posted from a fictitious Moscow machine, as the Soviet general secretary, that the USSR was joining Usenet. It was the first online April Fool with international reach; he revealed himself two weeks later, by which time, he said, it had worried the Pentagon. When a real Moscow site joined in 1990, readers needed convincing it was not another prank, and its administrator named the gateway kremvax - a joke made true after the fact. A machine in Amsterdam was, in 1984, well enough connected that a message from it could alarm a superpower; four years later the same machine connected the continent.
Also known as: beertema, mcvax, kremvax, 17 november 1988
Sources
- CWI, on the 30th anniversary: on 17 November 1988 at 2:28 pm system administrator Piet Beertema received confirmation that CWI, as the first institute outside North America, had officially gained access to NSFNET; the institute was already the central hub of EUnet and its predecessor NLnet, and the connection came after years of preparation through good contacts in the network world
- Wikipedia: born 22 October 1943 in Amsterdam; first job in 1965 at the national aerospace laboratory, where he met his first computer, an Elliott 803; joined the Mathematical Centre in 1966 and stayed until retirement; on 17 November 1988 linked the Netherlands to NSFNET as one of the first two countries, shortly after France's INRIA; on 1 April 1984 created the kremvax Usenet site, posting as Konstantin Chernenko to announce the Soviet Union joining the network
- Newsweek, 2016: the 1984 hoax, posted from Amsterdam seven months after the Soviet Union shot down a Korean airliner, was the first online April Fool's with general international reach; Beertema revealed himself two weeks later and said it had caused genuine concern at the Pentagon; he had read Orwell's 1984, which came in handy
- News2mail: Beertema administered mcvax, the institute's machine at the junction of European UUCP traffic, registered the .nl domain in 1986 and opened the link to NSFNET in 1988; when a genuine Moscow site, demos.su, joined in 1990, some readers needed convincing it was not another prank, and its senior programmer later named the gateway kremvax.demos.su - a joke made retrospectively true by administrative action