November 17 marks exactly 35 years since the Netherlands became the first country in Europe to connect to the public Internet. This happened at research institute CWI (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica) in Amsterdam.
Nov. 17, 1988: System administrator Piet Beertema received an e-mail that day that CWI officially had access to an academic computer network that was part of the Internet.
Using the brand-new connection, Steven Pemberton logged on to an American computer from the CWI, not knowing he was making history by doing so. For the first time, people could send each other mail directly over the Internet. It had previously been possible to send electronic messages, but it was incredibly slow, over a regular telephone line. All messages then ended up in a digital mailbox, which forwarded mails to recipients once or twice a day. Starting Nov. 17, 1988, a new era dawned in which these messages reached the recipient within seconds.
Until then, Americans and Canadians were the only ones in the world using open Internet. Then the Netherlands followed. At first, mainly universities and research institutions used the connection; five years later, anyone with a computer could go online.
The CWI became a major player in the early years of the Internet era. For example, Internet pioneers Teus Hagen and Piet Beertema thought it would be useful if you could tell from e-mail addresses and Internet addresses that they came from the Netherlands. Steven Pemberton was also closely involved in developing HTML and CSS, the languages you use to create Web pages, for example. At the time, he had no idea that the development of the Internet would be so rapid, he says. "It wasn't until I was walking in Times Square in the mid-1990s and saw a poster with a Web address on it that I thought, 'This is for the general public now.'"
Still part of European Internet traffic passes through the Amsterdam Science Park, where CWI is located. This traffic goes through the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX).
For his work, Beertema received the first royal decoration ever awarded to an Internet pioneer in 1999: Knight of the Order of the Dutch Lion. Teus Hagen was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2013, as were former CWI employees Jaap Akkershuis (2017) and Daniel Karrenberg (2012). Steven Pemberton received a 2022 ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award, an award for innovation and leadership in human-computer interaction.
