USP

ops culture

Universidade de São Paulo: Brazil's largest research university and a founding participant of the ANSP academic network - Brazilian internet history runs through its physics and engineering departments' need to reach colleagues abroad.

One of the campuses whose email envy bootstrapped a national network.

The University of São Paulo is the largest and most research-intensive university in Brazil, and in this history it is one of the institutions on the far end of the first academic network links. ANSP connected it, and the physicists whose collaborations motivated the Fermilab connection worked there.

Its role is worth stating precisely because it is easy to overstate. USP did not build the Brazilian internet; FAPESP funded and operated the network, and RNP built the national backbone. What USP supplied was demand and expertise: the researchers who needed international connectivity badly enough to justify it, and the people who knew how to make it work once it existed.

That pattern is the ordinary one and worth recognizing. Research networks are built because researchers have a concrete problem that requires them, not because someone anticipated the internet. The physics collaboration that wanted to exchange data with Illinois produced, as a side effect, the country's first international link, and everything commercial that followed used infrastructure and expertise that existed because of an academic requirement nobody would have funded as a communications project.

Also known as: Universidade de São Paulo

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