Happy 30th anniversary, Philippine Internet!

THE transformative technology we call the internet and the applications developed and rolled out in the last three decades have changed the way we communicate and do business. We now communicate through instant messaging or video calls. We gather for a meeting in virtual rooms. We transact for goods and services in virtual marketplaces. We virtually travel to any destination. Looking for information, we have done away with scrounging through index cards in libraries and reading newspapers, magazines and other sources. We simply turn to the internet with the aid of powerful search engines that crawl through the internet's virtual library.

It was some 30 years ago, on March 29, 1994, to be exact, that the Philippines got connected to the internet. And the man credited for sending the country hurtling through the formless void of cyberspace is Benjie Tan, a hardware engineer who worked for a Makati-based company called Computer Network Systems Corp. (ComNet). I was fortunate to listen to the Philippines' original "internet explorer" (apologies to Microsoft for borrowing the term) tell his story some 15 years later.