« ΤΟ Δ’ΑΙΕΙ ΠΑΡΑΜΕΡΟΝ ΕΣΛΟΝ »

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You appear to be visitor of this site. Welcome!

 

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When I'm still alive and kicking, walking and talking, you're visiting a more or less (more less than more, actually) actively maintained site. But once I'm "on the wrong side of the grass", (being) recycled by tiny bottom-dwelling organisms, reduced to an orderly or loose collection of 206 bones, blown to shreds by the popular pastime of shooting, shelling, bombing or blasting, cremated to ashes blowing in the wind or neatly stored, resomated and washed away, vaporized by a nuclear blast or the impact of an extraterrestrial object, sucked into a black hole, or in any other way have ceased to exist, you're visiting an archived copy of the last maintained version of this site, "cast in digital concrete" yet fully functional, with a most likely gradually but ever increasing number of links that either fail or lead to sites that are more or less or even completely unrelated to [the purpose of] the sites they originally referred to.

A striking example of the latter was a link to a Dutch theatre group's site: after the group stopped performing, its domain name was deregistered, but shortly thereafter it was registered again, of all things by a Chinese mining company! I never understood this odd new registration. A non-educated guess might be that it was because the company had no clue about the meaning of the Dutch name, but found .NL-domains to be high-ranking in search engines and .NL therefore reliable and attractive for PR.

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In common speak 'internet' has become synonymous to 'www'. That's however as wrong as calling a road-system a 'car', for no other reason than that cars are the main 'apps' using it. In reality however, and so in my story below, 'internet' stands for the network interconnecting a wild variety of computers worldwide, speaking the same "language" to communicate: the Internet Protocol, or in short IP. And 'www', CERN's first and in fact sort of 'prehistoric' website is no more than the first computer using the key applications and services that use this Internet as carrier of specifically formatted data, u also an application that I've never been deeply involved with. And even nowadays e-mail still rivals it, albeit that e-mail has "evolved" (I'd rather call it downgraded) into a whole bunch of non-interoperable programs, using "protected" and encryped data to exchange even the simplest and "nothing to hide" information. At the same time e-mail headers have literally exploded, from once comprising at most a few hundred bytes with machine-readable information about the mail, to 8000+ (!) bytes for the same purpose nowadays.
Anyway, if you talk to me about 'internet', be sure to refer to the Right Thing, or you'll find yourself in Deep Digital Trouble (!) in Electronic Limbo. :-)

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Contrary to popular habit - in particular on lots of commercial sites - this website has not been, eh... "optimized" for a specific browser (read: made inaccessible or barely - if at all - readable for - or non-functional with - other browsers), nor does it use non-html stuff like js, php, py, ai, ads, rtfm, etc. Therefore it can be viewed with just any browser, old or new - except when they've been configured without even the slightest knowledge of 'backward compatibility - and including text-only ones. And in particular this site doesn't bother you with those dreaded and utterly annoying "informational" (read: commercial) pop-ups. But although it doesn't pertain to this site, I'd in general discourage the use of the mainstream (read: most pushed - if not enforced - by Big Tech) browsers Chrome, Edge and Safari, but also Opera, because they don't block, and you can't configure them to block, the privacy- violating tracking euphemistically called "hyperlink auditing".
And elaborating on the previous paragraph: you visit this website with a web browser, not with what is popularly - even by those who really should know better - with what is called an "internet browser". A wide variety of devices (real computers, "smart"phones, routers, home appliances, surveillance cameras, audio systems, even baby phones, etc.) nowadays is connected to the internet, but only a fraction of them all really can be browsed, and even less of the latter category is well-protected (strong password, adequate data encryption, etc.).

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This site doesn't use cookies, trackers, web beacons or other privacy threats, nor does it collect personal information *). However, it does contain links to content on external sites that may behave otherwise or even cheat you and lure you into paying money to criminals. That falls outside the responsibility of this site's author though.
I never publish any of my e-mail addresses. I only give them to others for direct communication with me, and only if I consider them trustworthy. Therefore it is strictly forbidden to give them to others without my explicit permission. That includes in particular using them, or any other of my private data, on any of what are euphemistically called 'social' media. Media that I avoid like the bubonic plague, if only because I do care about privacy. For the same reason I also don't use WhatsApp, no matter how popular it is among the addicted privacy-ignorant. The only exception was Signal, but sadly in early 2025 a tsunami of updates, probably meant to make it more palatable for WhatsApp addicts, has terribly deteriorated it.
But there are more factors that threaten your privacy, even to the point where "smart"phones as such become a most serious threat to your privacy in two ways:

1.

In 2024 the EU came up with an as ludicrous as immense threat to privacy. An idea that, even though its goal was sympathetic, was completely absurd and lacked any sense of reality. That idea, raised by a bunch of brainless politicians and their adorers, was to force "smart"phone makers to make and distribute an "update" for each and every smartphone, an update that would scan all your entire phone for signs of child porn and report those back. Normal, decent people would simply call that by its real name: hacking. And once such a blatant intrusion would become reality, it's for sure that more will follow suit.

2.

Also in 2024 the European Court of Justice (!) ruled that "under circumstances" selling personal data, e.g. by sports clubs, to commercial parties, without the person's consent or even knowledge, would be "legal". It's the dreaded euphemism already known for quite some time and euphemistically denoted as "legitimate interest". That's nonsense: your personal data are yours and yours alone, even if some entity like a sports club needs to have them for their own (local, protected) administration (membership, ranking, financial, playing court, etc.)

*) When I've ceased to exist, this site will live on in an archived form. However, the server or cloud service serving it then may have its own policy regarding cookies - in particular bitter almond cookies - etc., or change it at any time, leading to violating my no cookies etc. statement. But by definition that's beyond my bodily remains' control then and thus beyond my disapproval or consent.

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To start with: D-Day (Delivery Day, that is): I was born! It was in Amsterdam, on 22 October 1943, in the middle of WW II, that in the dead of the night, at 04:05, my mother pushed me out of her vagina, followed by me taking my first breaths and becoming a brandnew living human being. But also, as I became aware of all too well much later, yet another addition to the species that has become by far the biggest threat and disaster for Planet Earth and literally all non-human species that live on it.
BUT! There is hope. For Planet Earth, that is. We're almost in -  and in several respects already are experiencing - the Sixth Mass Extinction of global biodiversity, except that this one isn't he first one caused by a most extreme and unimaginably violent natural phenomenon, but entirely by the most lunatic living species that ever existed on earth: mankind itself.

As a tart aside: on the same day that I was born, the Allied Forces bombed the German city of Kassel with incendiary bombs, creating a massive fire storm and killing some 10.000 civilians, including pregnant women, babies and children.

But let's get back to where I was with "whoami":
My father and mother both were teachers - as were my grandfather and my father's brothers - which may explain some of my character traits. ;-) After elementary school (Pieter Oosterleeschool) and finishing Gymnasium-β (Hervormd Lyceum Zuid) - I'm mentioning the school names here for Dutch visitors of this site and/or their offspring who may be in search of former class/school mates or their siblings (see mijn schooltijd (in Dutch)) - After finishing elementary school I spent a short and utterly boring period studying electrical engineering at the Technische Hogeschool Eindhoven (later: rename to Eindhoven University of Technology), only to find that merely studying wasn't my way of "getting something done in life" and heavily collided with my leaning towards experimenting and my do-it-yourself attitude. Which is why I broke off my study and started looking for a job, which by sheer coincidence I found shortly thereafter. At that time I obviously didn't have the faintest idea what this eventually would lead to...
In 1965 I took my first job at the Dutch National Aerospace Laboratory, where I first learned about and worked with with the thing called "computer". By modern standards that machine (an Elliott 803-B) was a truly exceptional contraption: 39-bits, 8 Kw memory (8 K 39-bit words, that is, so roughly 40 KByte), a separate floating-point processor (!), 500 chars/sec (!) paper tape readers, tape units using sprocketed 35 mm magnetic "film" (right, exactly the same format as used in 'analog' 35 mm photo cameras; click on the picture to see a presentation video, and note the magnetic "film" reel on top of the tape unit), but a speed that was, well... low: e.g. CPU's of the (a^o 2022) AMD Ryzen series are more than 10 million times faster... (Comparing the speed of such old processors to modern multi-core, multi-GHz ones is pretty tricky though). In fact the speed was so low (576 μs for an integer addition) that, to read numbers from paper tape at full speed, we had to use a trick: a then undocumented FPU instruction ("65 3", left shift 3 places, 576 μs, plu 2 fixe-poin additions)), to keep up with the speed of the tape reader... Despite being so slow, that Elliott was successfully used in the design of airplanes (Fokker F-27 'Friendship', turboprop engines), and Fokker F-28 'Fellowship', jet engines).
After one year at the Aerospace Lab, on 1 September 1966, I was fed up with the militarist athmosphere and took a job at the Mathematical Centre, later - when informatics had become a science of its own next to and with strong connections to mathematics - renamed to CWI (for Dutch people: CWI is the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, which has nothing to do with the former Arbeidsbureau that later grabbed the same abbreviation). The first computer I worked with there was about 20 times faster than the Elliott. And what was especially interesting about that computer, the Electrologica X1, was that it was developed and built by and at the Mathematical Centre, which since 1950 had been developing and building experimental computers (see also the article "Computers ontwerpen, toen" (in Dutch) y Carel Scholten, in Dutch), starting with the ARRA (comprising 1200 electro-mechanical relays), ARRA II (also relays), ARMAC (using 1200 vacuum tubes and consuming 10 kW of mains power!), and ending with the X1.
Electrologica was the Mathematical Center's spin-off company that took over the building and marketing of the X1 (as van Wijngaarden put it: "we're a scientific institute, not a computers builder and seller"). Together they developed a range of computers, culminating in the Electrologica X8 mainframe computer, a machine designed specifically to run Algol 60. It was roughly 12 times faster than the X1 (X1 32µs, X8 2.5µs cycle time) and featured a micro-programmed I/O processor, named CHARON after the mythological ferryman, and in Dutch an acronym standing for "Centraal Hulporgaan Autonome Overdracht Nevenapparatuur" (I won't even try to translate that). CHARON served a variety of "slow" (1000 chars/s 8-channel punched paper tape readers, 150 chars/s 8-channel paper tape punches, a line printer, etc.) peripheral devices. In addition it handed over control of "fast" devices (magnetic drum, magnetic-tape units, harddisks) to a separate controller "SWITCH" (interestingly, whereas all devices were consistently designated in Dutch - e.g. bandlezer (punched tape reader), regeldrukker (line printer), trommel (magnetic drum), etc. As far as I can remember "SWITCH" was neither an abbreviation nor did it have a designation in Dutch, although very occasionally I've heard it being called "Snelle Schakelaar" (Fast Switch).

A peculiar repair
One day it was discovered that the X8's floating-point unit was producing erratic results. One of Electrologica's highly skilled technicians found the cause: a signal between two modules randomly arriving either just in time or a tiny fraction too soon on the receiving module. To delay the signal a little bit he replaced the about 1 meter long wire carrying the signal by one of a couple of meters long and made a wad of the excess lenght (coiling it up would cause unwanted side-effects). This makeshift repair worked like a charm and the problem never showed up again.

Later a DEC PDP-8/I minicomputer was acquired and equipped by Electrologica, with a custom-made interface designed and built by hem linking it to the X8. It served for Remote Job Entry from the VU (Free University) over a slow 110 baud (!) telephone line (interestingly, the PTT didn't know about its existence, because although it had its own phone number, it didn't show up in their administration...). After the X8 was decommissioned in 1974, I got permission from the management - and great enthusiasm from the director Aad van Wijngaarden, founder of the Mathematical Center, because "it was the first time since 1956 that someone at MC/CWI was working on computer hardware" - to keep the X8's line printer and rewire the PDP8-X8 interface for driving the printer. It sure yielded a peculiar sight: a minicomputer with a max-sized line printer, but it worked like a charm. And I was happy with the success.
In the 1960's "computer" was in fact synonymous to "mainframe", and they were massive and hellishly expensive. The time of personal computers, GIGAbytes of memory and TERAbytes of disk space (the latter now fitting into a micro USB stick - compare that to the hard disk drive shown here: a 80 MEGAbyte unit (± 1980)). 'Unix', 'Windows', 'Mac', they all were still lightyears away.
Until my retirement in 2004 I've been working at CWI, as programmer, system programmer, systems manager, network manager, and several other disguises, with strong emphasis on networking, as will become clear from the following:
In the networking area I've been deeply involved in the setup of European networking, as the central technical manager of what later became EUnet (European Unix network), and networking in the Netherlands, through my early involvement in the Dutch EUnet branch, which later was split off when Ted Lindgreen (then at the Dutch National Institute of Nuclear Physics) founded NLnet as the official Dutch branch of EUnet (in April 1998 renamed to UUnet Nederland).
EUnet was founded in 1982, at the Paris conference of the EUUG (European Unix User Group). Participants on behalf of CWI were Teus Hagen, Jim McKie and Jaap Akkerhuis. In a working group at the conference it was decided that a (dial-up) network would be set up between as many as possible EUUG member countries. The topology of the network would be a star, with a backbone site in each country. Backbone sites would have connections between them where it would be deemed necessary or just practical, and one site would be the hub of the star, connecting to the USA and handling all the data traffic between EUnet and the USA.
However, none of the organizations represented at that meeting expected their management to be willing to take up the hub role. It was my colleague Teus Hagen who broke the stalemate by announcing that he expected to be able to convince the CWI (Amsterdam) management of the importance and necessity to take up that crucial role. And sure enough, he turned out to be right, and that's how CWI became the central European backbone site, and in later years a focal point in many network developments.
The first countries to participate in the setup of EUnet were the Netherlands (CWI), Denmark (DIKU), France (INRIA), England (UKC) and Scotland (Univ. Edinburgh), soon followed by Germany (Univ. Dortmund) and Sweden (ENEA Data).
Life wasn't easy in those days of pioneering, witness this article that I posted in the net.general newsgroup on Usenet (Usenet in those days was what you'd call now a social medium, but much more serious and subject- driven) in 1982 (mcvax-decvax was our first (dialup) US connection:
Nowadays in most English/American publications it is said that the UUCP network was a network of loosely cooperating sites. But that was the case in the USA, and even Very much so. Connection information (with which site names and their dial-up frequency) was collected in the so-called "uucp maps" newsgroups which were posted on a infrequent (mostly monthly) basis in the comp.mail.maps Usenet newsgroup. And every single US UUCP site had to pick up those files and construct its own complete network-wide routing table using the 'pathalias' software written by Peter Honeyman.
On EUnet I set up an entirely different system. I soon developed and deployed a system, making use of the star configuration of EUnet, where all backbone sites maintained the uucp map for their own country, and a fully automated nightly exchange of only hose national maps that had been changed, between each national backbone site and mcvax. Fast and relatively cheap and up-to-date on a daily basis. On the same basis mcvax automatically exchanged all maps with that were changed with the USA, where they would reach the distribution point feeding them he into comp.mail.maps newsgroup (actually "news" is a misnomer here because the "articles" contained only purely echnical information. And, as opposed to the USA, on EUnet no leaf site had to construct the full routing tables itself: all a site had to do was to exchange mail with its national backbone site, which in turn exchanged mail with mcvax, which exchanged it all with the USA (and with Australia, Japan, etc.) This system has functioned like a charm for many, many years. So from a user's perspective I daresay Europe was far ahead of the US in this respect.

A note on the relation between the EUUG and EUnet:
The EUUG claimed ownership of EUnet. In reality however EUnet was completely self-supporting. It had no employees and thus no salary costs, because the people operating the backbone sites were employed by their (scientific) institutes, and did their EUnet work in both their institutes interest and in their own time. This was feasible because the scientists working at the institutes had a vested interest in - mainly e-mail - digital connectivity with fellow scientists worldwide, especially on long distances (think e.g. of the time difference between Europe and Australia). The only "special case" was the Dutch branch of EUnet, because that was served by mcvax too in a dual role as both Europe's central/international and Dutch national backbone site. This odd situation, in fact giving Dutch sites a financial edge, was corrected later when NLnet, founded by Ted Lindgreen, became the official Dutch branch of EUnet, with its own backbone machine ("hp4nl"). Also, the inequality in costs - unlike all other backbone sites, NLnet had no expensive long-distance phone call costs whereas those of Iceland were soaring high - was eventually settled in an overall multilateral cost-sharing agreement.
 
This all doesn't mean though that the EUUG played no role all for EUnet: it generated publicity, leading to a lot more sites - many of them research departments of companies - hooking up to EUnet, it mediated in a number of tough political issues (e.g. with Yugoslavia), it organized and sponsored the semi-annual EUUG conferences, with each of them facilitating a technical and strategic meeting of the European backbone site managers, including their travel costs, but for them at no cost.

The central machine in this European network initially was a DEC VAX 11/780 (serial number 38!), named 'mcvax' (Mathematical Centre VAX). For establishing the first (inter)national links we used autodialers (see picture; remarkable aside: to prevent replication of the devices, the manufacutrer had literally scratched off the type stamps of all IC's!), which in those days were illegal and therefore had to be smuggled to other countries (it would take very long before most countries legalized them, with Switzerland being the most stubborn and thus the last one), an activity we use o call "acting ahead of the law"... ;-)
The autodialers then had a price tag of [the equivalent of] about 1200 euro, but many years later their functionality was built into every 10-euro modem). Initially we started with 300 bit/s (!) modems for the transatlantic link, but the traffic picked up so fast, making the costs run so high that in just a few months we replaced them with 1200 bit/s ones. That however turned out to be easier said than done and has caused us serious headaches.

At the start of EUnet, when connecting up Scotland, we were in for a nasty and, in hindsight, ridiculous surprise. The intended backbone site was the University of Edinburgh. But each and every of their attempts to dial in on mcvax with the autodialer consistently failed. It took the person responsible for the backbone site-to-be there quite some time - and some hair loss - to find the problem's peculiar cause. To his astonishment the university's telephone exchange appeared to be a "prehistoric" one: an original but still fully functioning exchange dating from end 1890's (!) and (therefore) using electro-mechanical rotary stepping switches, with the dialtone generated by an electromotor, at a frequency that was way below the autodialer's dialtone detection range. Once the cause was found, it didn't take a lot of time to solve the problem with instructions given by phone the help of the autodialer's maker. I can assure you we were all very happy that at last the connectivity with Scotland was finally working.

In those days, making computers communicate over long distances already was a far from trivial exercise, but with the 1200 bit/s modems it unexpectedly became a true nightmare, witness this Usenet article that I posted on July 31, 1982. After much invesigation cause was found to be as simple as rightout destructive. The cause of the problem described in that posting turned out to be an as simple as destrictove quirk built into the autodialers: they were found to put a "notification tone" on the phone line that happened to be located within - and thus interfere with - one of the modem's two data carrier bands. That "notification tone" however wasn't cooked up by the autodialer's maker though, but turned out to be a silly legal requirement, with the tone meant to prevent panic in case a dialing error occurred and the proverbial 'widow in the countryside' got a completely unexpected and therefore apparently alarming (family member suddenly died?) phone call in the still of the night, but having woken up and taken up the phone heard only silence and panicked. The fix was really trivial: cutting out just one resistor in the circuit generating that tone, clocked that tone, whereafter establishing connections worked like a charm And we never got or heard of complaints from panicking widows... ;-)
It was also in those early days that we ran into an "expensive zero-cost problem". When checking the system one morning, the outgoing phone line appeared to be hanging in occupied state, with a call to the USA in progress since late the previous afternoon, a duration of 18 hours or more. With the telco prices of those days that call could cost 5000 guilders (2300 euro)! I immediately ran off to the campus' PBX to check its logfile. And sure enough: it had registered that call, with 9999 on the (4 digits) ticks counter. So we were left with the unpleasant task of informing CWI's director of a "financial issue". But the real - and pleasant - surprise came the next month, when the telco's bill showed nothing exceptional in that period of time. So we could only conclude or guess that either the modem at the US side had properly terminated the call, with our modem or software simply having failed to notice it, or the PTT's readout or billing software having discarded the readout as "impossible" and thus an error. Phew...
As the transatlantic data traffic with the USA grew rapidly, the need arose for a faster type of connection. A leased line was not an option, being prohibitively expensive. An X.25 packet-switched connection using a PAD (Packet Assembler / Disassembler) looked very promising, making speeds of upto 9600 bit/s feasible. But it required a site in the USA to connect to that also had an X.25 connection, which was quite uncommon there. So I posted a message to the net.general newsgroup on Usenet (in those days, since 1979, Usenet was what we now call a "social medium"), looking for an X.25 US counterpart willing to take preferably all, but at least part of the Europe-USA data traffic. The response was, as expected: I got only two of them: one from Hughes Aircraft Company and one from the Center for Seismic Studies ("seismo"). Only the latter was willing to carry all the traffic. And that's how I got in touch with what I call my "golden contact": Rick Adams of "seismo".
Initially the X.25/PAD connection turned out to be a deception, but finding and fixing the causes took quite a lot of time. One cause was Tymnet, that by default set all PAD interface speeds to 1200 bit/s (commonplace within USA) instead of the 9600 bit/s that we required and had ordered. Another cause was "hidden" in the UUCP software: it had an internal protocol ("g-proto") for handling the actual data exchange, but this protocol, in combination with how X.25 worked and the way it was charged (per packet, irrespective of how many of a packet's bytes were used (the g-proto's ACK packets contained only a few bytes, but were charged as full packets), made it far too expensive for regular use. So I wrote a new protocol ("f-proto") specifically for the PAD's 7-bit wide data path and allowing (XON/XOFF) flow control of the data stream (the PAD was designed for a flow-controlled 7-bit data stream). After these fixes/changes the connection worked like a charm and at minimal cost. And additionally it could be used on any other type of 7-bit wide connection paths too, e.g. those through the then familiar RS232 terminals and port selectors). On July 31, 1984 I published the f-proto source code for general use. Not much later Robert Elz (Australia) wrote uu7encode/uu7decode, 7-bit versions of the well-known uuencode/uudecode software, using the mapping scheme of my f-proto. Robert described that in his typical humorous way: "If you think it's a fluke that 040 .. 0171 just happen to be the chars that Piet Beertema's uucp 'f' protocol transmits as single bytes, you're insane."
The second cause was in fact rather trivial, but beyond our control, so we couldn't fix it ourselves. The culprit turned out to in the intermediate X.25 network of Tymnet, where the packet transport software was incorrectly configured to accept and transfer only small packets. Once the cause was found, Tymnet quickly corrected the problem - which turned out to be just one wrong setting in their software - and data transfers finally ran at full speed.

As a remarkable but destructive aside: when the connection to South Korea was switched to X.25, it made their computer crash in blink of an eye on each and every attempted data rransfer. The cause turned out to be hardware, or rather: the firmware therein. Their system was equipped with a hardware X.25 interface, which was a pretty smart idea. However, it knew and could handle only single 512-bytes packets. The PADs however allowed, entirely in accordance with the X.25 specification, a packet's "M-bit" to be set, which indicated that the next packet was to be treated as a prolongation of the current packet. And exactly was what the f-proto was making use of, stretched it to the limit: by setting the M-bit in every packet in a stream of packets, it crammed an entire file of, say, 2 Mbyte into one X.25 packet plus all following packets, until the terminating packet that had the M-bit off. I don't recall how the Koreans manage to fix or circumvent the problem, nor if they did it themselves. My guess is that the interface manufacturer changed the firmware such that upon an M-bit a packet was considered complete and pushed to the next higher level, where the computer's storage could store the ongoing data until packet completion.

As the network expanded and the traffic grew, the name 'mcvax' (which after all was CWI's main computer) was transferred to subsequent other computers taking over the network role "as an aside", until eventually a SUN Microsystems workstation (!) got that role and the name was changed into 'mcsun', although in its function as gateway, except that in its role as interconnect between EUnet and EARN/BITNET it kept the by then already famous name 'MCVAX'.
Initially (inter)national networking was based on the UUCP communication protocol built into every flavor of Unix (which is why my first e-mail address was mcvax!piet). Later, when we moved to the TCP/IP (Internet) protocols, networking started to cover a wild variety of systems.
The first national, international and intercontinental UUCP connections were established around 1982. The first open transatlantic Internet connectivity ("open" as opposed to "private" links, mainly for military and military-related purposes, like SATNET) for Europe started at CWI, on 17 November 1988. The confirmation was pretty cute: it came in a (forwarded) ultra-short and ultra-cryptic e-mail message from the NSFnet boss Steve Wolff to me. After a few trials together with some colleagues, my reaction was almost as short as theirs: "Let's see if it works. Yes, it does, so let's get back to work." The US counterpart was 'seismo', which in turn connected to NSFnet (which in those days stood for "the Internet"). At 'seismo' the in effect crucial and historical change didn't comprise much more than moving one cable from one computer to another. At the CWI side the line literally terminated just a few meters from my office. Later the US end was moved to UUnet, proposed and established by  -who else?-  Rick Adams. It was only a few days later that this CWI/EUnet-US Internet connection was followed by a NORDUnet-US connection. Theirs could have been a couple of days earlier, but their transatlantic line suffered from technical problems, which took a couple of days to solve. Of course both networks were very happy that their connections weren't established a few weeks earlier, because it was then, on November 2, 1988, that the dreaded Morris worm, the first of its kind, hit the Internet an hit it really hard, with links all over the USA going down. By sheer "luck" our networks narrowly escaped this worm and the damage caused by it... A few months later, in early 1989, an Internet connection was established between NORDUnet and CWI/EUnet, one purpose of it being that our respective US connections would act as backup for each other.
In a short period of time soon these developments sparked a lot of activity among parties actively involved in the IP "scene". One of the first joint actions undertaken was the initiative in May 1989 to form a common European organization for the coordination of IP activities in Europe, named "RIPE" (Réseaux IP Européens, i.e. French for European IP networks): 11 organizations were represented at the first meeting. Needless to say that all of them were vehemently anti-OSI and that their common goal was to spread Internet connectivity - the faster and wider, the better - throughout Europe.
In the period that I've been involved in all this, transatlantic speed went up from 300 bit/s (!) to 256 kbit/s. And it's still ever increasing beyond imagination (the sky is the limit). In that time, even for academic/research sites like CWI, getting access to the "Internet" (in fact we're talking here about ARPAnet, and later NSFnet) was far from trivial, requiring a lot of lobbying, tenacity, "patrons" and signatures (real ones, on paper ;-)).
In particular Rick Adams of the Center for Seismic Studies (later of UUnet and founder of UUnet), Steve Wolff, and Steve Goldstein of NSF - the US National Science Foundation - have been of invaluable help in this. None of us could even remotely foresee though how dramatically the situation with the Internet would change later, in only a few years time, and how commercially spoiled (ads, ads, ads) and desinformation-spreading it would become... On the positive side, also some companies should be mentioned here, companies that contributed hardware to the early European and Dutch parts of the UUCP network and Internet, and in doing so to its success: Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Sun Microsystems (SUN), Hewlett Packard (HP) and Cisco Systems (Cisco). The router Cisco contributed (after some begging and pleading from our side) was one of the first, if not the first, in Europe; and for Cisco this contribution became a key, if not the key, to their success in Europe. Apart from these contributions, EUnet has been self-supporting right from the start. For a 'look behind the curtains' you may want to read the Stockholm paper, a document written for a conference in Stockholm in 1987.
It sure was a crazy, yet exciting time, those early days of getting EUnet off the ground and Europe-wide functioning. Remarkable things happened in the process. Can you imagine being invited to fly from CWI in Amsterdam to Olivetti Headquarters in Ivrea, Italy, and being picked up by a limousine at the airport, and all that for installing UUCP on their machines?!? But that really is what happened to me, because I was that technical invitee. Many years later such software installed in some 15 seconds or in some cases even less...
There were less funny things too, though, and we had to fight many a battle for our case. Some of them were lost (e.g. the founder and owner of ARPAnet, DARPA, refused to grant us access to their, for that time phenomenally fast, 56 kbit/s (military) SATNET link), some won (like the utterly ridiculous one with AT&T, that stubbornly refused to send us their bills for our half of the transatlantic link by air mail, each and every month sending them by boat, with the result that we got every bill as late as 6 weeks (!) after they were sent, but already within 4 weeks AT&T claimed that we hadn't paid the bills (surprise, surprise...) and threatened to discontinue our transatlantic line. Needless to say that every time that caused panic on our side. Then the solution - once again - came from Rick Adams: he agreed with AT&T that it would send those bills to seismo, seismo would pay them and right away e-mail a copy to CWI, and without delay CWI would pay them to seismo. Pretty clumsy, but faced with AT&T's really incredible and shortsighted (we had made the consequences very clear to them) bureaucrazy, sometimes a simple and well-functioning workaround can be easy and quickly implemented, if you can revert to and rely on sane, cooperative people.
It was in a later stage that the European Commission refused to have anything to do with "non-standard" (read: not cooked-up by "official" telecom standards bodies like the ITU) protocols like TCP/IP and instead literally wasted millions of European taxpayers' money in "promoting" (read: enforcing) "OSI networking" (X.25 and X.400), a battle eventually won by the end users who insisted on real connectivity and thus on TCP/IP. For your amusement here are 2 links to OSI-related fun: a poem on OSI and alternatives to OSI. The sad side of this story was that this "protocol war", waged vehemently by the European Commission and 'RARE' (the EU being physically located in Brussels seems enough reason to use French abbreviations), an "umbrella organization" of a couple of national R&D networks in Europe, effectively set those networks arrear, since they were forced to take the slow, expensive an futureless OSI track and were actively blocked from Internet access, even when that was already widely available through EUnet and CWI. (As Rob Blokzijl (†) of Nikhef/HEPnet (and later RIPE chairman) put it: "Rare isn't well-done"). It took more than a year before the Dutch universities could use Internet, and that was only after the SURFnet management had decided to take a practical approach and use both OSI (because they had to) and TCP/IP (because they saw it as the only viable option and some already used it internally).
In other countries it took longer, much longer/ In particular in Germany the stubborn resistance of DFN (their R&D network), led by the OSI-fanatic Peter Kaufmann, caused it to take years before DFN finally realized that they were on a dead track with their OSI addiction and fighting an already lost battle. And eventually even the EC (!) gave up on it...
Of course we also had active partners in "practical TCP/IP insubordination", like NORDUnet, the R&D network in the Nordic countries, and HEPnet/CERN, through the excellent cooperation with the technical and practical folks of our neighbour institute Nikhef.
This all happened long before the word "Internet" became a buzzword and "internet" became a commodity, a supermarket item - an initially expensive supermarket item though - And later we reached the in fact crazy situation where phone companies offer phone services over the Internet, eh... over internet: 'VoIP' (Voice over IP). For the technically oriented it should be obvious that not VoIP, but TCP should have been used for this - after all VOIP is an acronym for Telephone Conversation Protocol. :-)
Long before this all, on April 25, 1986, or 25-4-1986¹), still in the "UUCP period" (in that time UUCP was the standard protocol for communication between Unix systems), CWI, in the person of undersigned, registered the NL top level domain (later: ccTLD, acronym for country code Top Level Domain, as opposed to gTLD for generic Top Level Domain), in the framework of its international and national networking activities. The reason for switching to domain addressing, and thus for registering .NL, was a purely technical and practical one: UUCP host names could have at most 7 letters and digits and had to be unique worldwide (!), with a European (me) and a worldwide arbitrator (Gene Spafford ("spaf") of Purdue University) arbitrating in cases of name clashes, arbitration that sometimes could take quite some time and required several iterations of back-and-forth mailing. When the number of UUCP hosts worldwide approached about 25000, this system became unworkable. Fortunately however there was a just-in-time solution: the hierarchical domain name system, with delegation of naming and arbitration on sequentially lower levels to hierarchically (in terms of subdomain levels) administrators was the perfect solution. And contrary to urban legend, ".NL" wasn't something we invented ourselves: the Internet standard RFC 920 (1984) already included - albeit after sometimes hot debates - the notion of 2-letter country code Top Level Domains, with the 2-letter codes taken from the official ISO standard ISO-3166 (and thus in many cases different from the country codes on cars).
For obvious reasons the first domain I registered under .NL was cwi.nl, on May 1, 1986.²) I managed .NL all on my own until 31 January 1996, when Boudewijn Nederkoorn of SURFnet, Ted Lindgreen of NLnet, and myself on behalf of CWI, set up a separate foundation, (Stichting Internet Domeinregistratie Nederland or SIDN), to take over the management of .NL. This transfer of management had become a sheer necessity, due to the explosive growth of the number of domains (see graph) - and thus my already extremely high workload - and due to the rapid commercialisation of the Internet. But it would still last until January 1997 before SIDN took over the actual registration work, which I'd been doing all on my own ever since the registration of the NL domain. Not surprisingly, right from SIDN's start I was one of its board members, but in May 2002 I handed over this function to younger folks. But ever since, I have a special and pleasant relationship with SIDN, bearing the - purely honorary - title of "Bijzonder Raadgever" (Special Counsellor), but also an equally pleasant personal contact with several SIDN employees.
Since its foundation, SIDN has become an overwhelming success. As of 2021, SIDN had grown to 100 employees and an annual turnover of 20 million euros. For a large part this success can be credited to its managing director Roelof Meijer, who joined SIDN in 2005. On the negative side though, it remains to be seen if this success will be continued. As of 2023 the growth of the number of .NL-domains levelled off, and early 2024 SIDN announced plans/agreements, to be implemented in the years thereafter, to move the actual domain registration process - but not the crucial and time-critical DNS-service - to "the cloud"³), more specifically to Amazon Web Services (AWS). So maybe SIDN will become AWSIDN... And although this would have some technical advantages - in particular switching from SIDN's somewhat out-of-date registration system to a brand-new system developed together with its Canadian counterpart CIRA - and would alleviate the ever more serious problem of shortage of qualified and trustworthy personnel. But even though the servers would be guaranteed to be located in Europe, it raised serious and widespread concern, if not an uproar, in broad circles - including well-known Dutch top experts - about privacy, because after all Amazon, the company that owns, provides and controls Amazon and its AWS service, is an American company - and thus subject to legislation and the most lousy, unreliable and dictatorial president it has ever had - and therefore subject to American laws and political quirks (it was also Jeff Bezos of AWS who donated a lot to his election campaign). So no matter what they "promise" or "agree upon", you can't trust them. And even "servers in Europe" doesn't mean all that much. After all, Hungary seems to have completely forgotten the Soviet invasion in 1965, Austria is hosting some 8000 Russian spies, and France and Germany are "special cases" on their own.

On January 17, 2025 the Dutch government intervened, ordering that only "under conditions" and "to a limited extent" SIDN was allowed to move the registration work.

BTW, the "clouded" privacy issue not only does, or is going to, apply to SIDN, but also to European governments and all sorts of crucial organizations and companies in Europe. Really no part, and I repeat: no part, is 100% immune for and adequately protected against all sorts of sophisticated hacking or stupidity. That was most clearly demonstrated in October 2024, when the Dutch police (!) was hacked and personal data of 60.000 (!) police men and women were stolen...

As a brief, but important aside:

SIDN (S = Stichting = Foundation) was founded in 1996 and registered as such with the Dutch KvK (Chamber of Commerce). However, for several reasons the Stichting was deregistered in 2022 and renamed to and registered as "SIDN B.V.". But despite the very valid reasoning behind the change, it caused the original name to be lost - except that it was preserved in the logo - and the same name - but with a different meaning - to be registered no less than 26 years after its "birth". And despite the reasoning behind it, many regard this change as a falsification (specifically the first letter, 'S' no longer covers the load).

In another sense this became all too clear in 2024. In decent countries, where there is freedom of press, writers and editors of newspapers operate independent of the newspaper''\s owner. However, in October 2024, the month before what Americans euphemistically call "elections", the editors of several until that time serious and reliable US newspapers, including highly esteemed ones, were literally forbidden by the newspapers' multi-zillion dollar owners to publish positive articles about the Democrats' candidate, Kamala Harris. Obviously that had nothing to do with freedom of press, but with criminal, zillion-dollars-financed, and thus dictatorship, oppression and in this case misogyny and the dreaded anti-blacks attitude.
But then, it's the USA, where freedom of speech, fair and democratic elections simply don't exist and never did: "the (regional/district/state) winner takes it all" has absolutely nothing to do with true democracy ("one (wo)man, one vote"). That sort of "elections" actually is quite usual though for English-speaking countries, like the US, UK, NZ, AU. Here we hit upon another problem for SIDN: Amazon/AWS is owned by Jeff Bezos, one of those zillion-dollar-driven dictators. And that AWS is supposed to be neutral and protect your privacy?!? Good grief, come on, I'd rather trust a black mamba or Tyrannosaurus Rex...
SIDN also has another problem. The 'whois' service on its website gives you suggestions for alternative names if a domain name you choose already exists. However, the suggested alternative names can very closely resemble the existing registered name, differing sometimes just one letter from the existing name. What this in fact boils down to is helping cyber/domain squatters by at least suggesting that such alternative names are perfectly acceptable.

¹)	The registration date 25-4-1986 made .NL's 35th birthday in 2021 a really special and for the math-minded remarkable one: adding up the digits of the date, 2+5+4+1+9+8+6, yields 35!

²)

SIDN's whois gives April 30, 1986 as registration date of cwi.nl. In those days however April 30 was Queen's Day, not factually, but officially appointed as the Queen's birthday, and therefore one of the Dutch public holidays. And even for this workaholic that was a day off, on which I could be legally lazy. ;-) Therefore that wrong date looks stupid, but it has a serious technical background: My registration database had date-only fields, because there was no need for anything more specific. At some point however, for several reasons SIDN change them to date+time fields, with the time of the "old domains" set to 00:00:00. But when in 2012 SIDN switched to using UTC, that switch shifted the date/time of all "old domains" to the previous day. Manual correction however would be a massive operation and was deemed too risky.

³)

"The cloud" and AI in a sense can, albeit on a terrestrial scale and confined to Planet Earth, be compared to what Fredric Brown wrote in his 1954 (!) science fiction short story "Answer". In more modern terms: digitization having escaped from human control. Not from commercial control though, but that's quite the opposite of human control.

After 10 years, in 1993, my involvement in both EUnet and NLnet came to an end. But old networkers (and the Pentagon...) may still remember my 1 April 1984 kremvax!chernenko alias.... (And for your amusement here's a link to a collection of April Fools on the Net throughout the years).
In the course of time I've been involved in various working groups, committees, ideas, etc. on networking topics, both on a national and an international scale, among others of SURFnet (the Dutch national research network) and RIPE (the European regional IP registry). I even managed to produce a real Internet standard (RFC 1537, which was obsoleted just a few years later, like so many standards). :-)
Last, but certainly not least, on 9 June 1999 I was completely taken by surprise when I received a high Royal Decoration (in Dutch: "Ridder in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw") for doing apparently useful things on an international scale; but even that couldn't make me lose my humor. :-)
Since "casting the net" has always been a collective effort, I'd like to share this honour with a number of my former colleagues Teus Hagen, Jaap Akkerhuis, Jim McKie (†), and Daniel Karrenberg (later one of the founders and head of RIPE); with Ted Lindgreen, founder of NLnet (with 'more than a little bit' of pressure from CWI ;-)); and with several people in many other countries in Europe and abroad. In the latter category I'd like to specifically mention Armando Stettner (USA/'decvax'), Dan Lorenzini (USA/'philabs'), Rick Adams (USA/'seismo'), Tohru Asami (Japan/'kddlabs'), and Robert Elz (Australia/'munnari'). And special thanks go to Keld Simonsen (Denmark/'diku') for providing us all with the necessary vital energy through his constant supply of 'Daim' (Danish candy bars) at the EUnet backbone meetings. :-)
BTW, it's interesting to note that such a small seed - just a few people interested in, and having a need for, "networking" - eventually led to Amsterdam becoming a focal point and "digital roundabout" on the information superhighway: the Amsterdam Internet Exchange or AMS-IX started on the WCW campus, next to CWI. Its largest branch is still located there and is still growing; so much so that the sidewalks there may soon be half a meter above street level, because of the massive bundles of data cables underneath them. ;-) Later a colocation data center ("Amsterdam AMS17 Data Center") was built on the WCW campus (the area by then already having been renamed to "Science Park"), almost opposite to the CWI building.
The AMS-IX has become one of the largest internet exchange points in the world, and a relatively old (1998-2008) sample of their 10-years traffic statistics overview gives an good impression of the explosive growth of internet traffic already in those days. Interestingly, AMS-IX's policy is as practical and idealistic as that of the early starters of networking: neutral, independent and not-for-profit.
At CWI I've also been involved in more recent ("recent" in hindsight) networking developments:
Started with experiments in 1993, in cooperation with other research institutes on campus, a 155 Mbit/s ATM network was installed at CWI connecting some 100+ workstations and servers, over an all-fibre-optic network, with some servers having multiple 155 Mbps links. It worked like a charm, but due to the rapid development and deployment of Fast Ethernet and later Gigabit Ethernet, and the high cost of ATM equipment, ATM became obsolete in a relatively short time. In those years the speed of CWI's main Internet connection (to/via SURFnet) increased to 155 Mbit/s too, initially via ATM, later via POS (Packet Over Sonet). But that wasn't the end of our Need for Speed: in July 2000 CWI entered a new "speed era", when a new core switch/router with Gigabit-speed ports was installed, with our core servers having single or multiple 1 Gbit/s links to it. At the same time our SURFnet connection was upgraded to 1 Gbit/s. And in 2005, the year after my retirement, 10 Gbit/s had already become sort of a commodity. On the experimental side a speed record was set on April 2 (perhaps intentionally not on April 1!) 2024 by Aston University (UK) researchers.
It's also interesting to make a comparison here between the low and high ands of the networking speed spectrum during our "networking history":
In 1983 CWI installed its first ethernet: 10 Mbit/s shared, over a thick yellow coax cable that old computer nerds will still remember as "thick ethernet" ('10BASE5'). Lots of people declared us insane, or somewhat politer wording for the same, because "we would never ever be able to fully use this immense bandwidth". Within a couple of years however 10 Mbit/s shared just didn't suffice anymore to meet the ever increasing traffic and speed demands, and 10 Mbit/s switched "thin ethernet" ('10BASE2') was the next step, which in turn was soon followed by 100 Mbit/s (switched) ethernet. In the decades that passed since the early networking days, the speed of CWI's external connection went up from three hundred  to ten billion bits per second... It's interesting to note that in that same period the speed at the high end of the range went up from 10 Mbit/s to 100 Gbit/s, or a 10000-fold increase, whereas in the same period the speed at the low (consumer) end has gone up from 300 bit/s to 100 Mbit/s, a 300000-fold increase! What's next? Here the story takes a turn, and not exactly a positive one. Whereas the Netherlands have long been leading in bringing internet to the masses, it was overtaken by Sweden: already as early as 2012 home connections of 1 Gbit/s speed were available there. And perhaps even more important: at affordable prices. In 2024 the situation did change somewhat: for (fiber) home connections the speed had gone upto 1 Gbit/s, but the prices stayed high. Comparison of prices to those in Sweden was no longer possible, due to the massive obfuscation.
The last couple of years before my retirement I spent part of my time working in a completely new and really cute environment: CWI's Personnel Department (later renamed to P&O when that abbreviation widely became the fashion), arranging for them a brand-new set of new pc's with flatscreens, managing their computers and creating an at that time state-of-the-art website for it. Not only was this environment new and quite unrelated to what I was used to, it was interesting too, being an all-girls department. ;-) The picture shows most of the gang. Looking at it, you may be wondering why I'm looking so bloody serious in such cute and cheerful company; well, so do I...
But it's all over and history. Well, in a sense. After a farewell symposium on September 16, 2004, where Rick Adams presented an interesting and very personal view on transatlantic networking history, I entered the state of enlightenment and rest called "retirement". Well... rest? Hm. I'd rather call it the next phase of restlessness. I had plenty of things to do, and staying away from computers might well have had an effect on me not unlike stopping to breathe.
That "plenty to do" already started before my retirement: in May 2003 I became technical volunteer at the Cruquius museum, an old steam pumping station dating from 1849, with its boilers removed and the machinery now working only for demos and driven by hydraulic power. Part of my work comprised of kicking the museum into the computer and internet era, which was far from trivial. But most of my work consisted of mechanical-technical work as member of a group called the "Stoomploeg" ("Steam team") of maintaining a magnificent piece of 19th-century, in that time state-of-the-art, hardware: the world-famous Cruquius steam engine, the largest steam engine ever built (144 inch cylinder diameter).
And in April 2010 the extreme makeover entered its last phase, when I was asked, in a rather unusual way, to become - and agreed upon - to become curator of another museum: Stoomgemaal Halfweg (Halfweg steam pumping station), also from the 19th century (1852), but - as opposed to the Cruquius - with a still fully functional steam engine and - manually operated! - coal-fired steam boiler. This steamy position lasted till the end of 2014, but I stayed as technical volunteer and visitors guide thereafter, until highly unpleasant management changes made me (and a whole lot of my colleague-volunteers) decide to irreversibly quit in 2020. A really sad end of a most pleasant period.
If, after reading all of the above, you might think that I'm utterly proud of myself, then that perception needs some serious correction. Apart from a few negative things - where don't you experience those in one way or another? - I've enjoyed by far the most of my working life, I've had my share of pleasure and fun. But being a workaholic, I've also experienced what a burnout means and what profound physical and mental effects it has on you. And when I reached the age of 80, I strongly experienced what effect that has or can have on your physical and mental wellbeing.
But I'm really glad, very glad indeed that I've "seen it all happen" and that I've been so actively involved in a development that has had such a profound impact on society, resulting in what for millions of people has become an integral, and for many even addictive, part of life. But let's be real: I certainly wasn't the only one in that all, far from that, and all players do deserve credit. But also, for that matter: sort of blame, for making - unwantingly and to their own and unpleasant surprise - spam, phishing, digital theft, privacy violation, etc. possible.
Let's take a brief moment to reflect on what caused the internet to grow so explosively to its current - and ever expanding - state. Several factors, all resulting from things that have been developed and taken place within a relatively short time span, have contributed to that:

•	A - this time positive - action from the European Commission to break the national PTT's monopolies, resulting in a steep decline of the costs of telephone calls and leased lines. Unfortunately followed by takeovers and concentrations, leading to an increase in prices and new or massively expanded monopolies, sanctioned by the government and by what we stubbornly keep calling "laws" and "judges".
•	A judgment by the European Court (1985) that national PTT's could no longer forbid third party traffic over leased lines. Consequently, where such a prohibition was part of national legislation, that legislation had to be - and was -- changed.
•	The advent of fiber optics, which tremendously increased the speed at which data could be carried over (long) cables, including transoceanic cables. Cables that later came under threat of disruption by Russian spy ships, disguised as commercial or fishing ships.
•	The invention at CERN of the World Wide Web (1990) by software developer Tim Berners-Lee and his project manager Robert Cailliau, "marrying hypertext to the Internet", and the development of the NCSA Mosaic web browser (1992), the first graphical one, soon followed by Netscape Navigator (1994), both by Mark Andreessen and Eric Bina, that immensely popularized the Web. So much so that in a relatively short period of time www became application #2 right after e-mail. The biggest mistake Mark made, once the browsers were a success and voluntarily tested by numerous people, was to start demanding money for them.
•	The activities of (in the Netherlands) groups like HCC, IAF, Knoware and XS4ALL ("the day we started, before 7:00 pm 500 customers had subscribed"), set up to provide the "common, non-scientific, user" with e-mail, and later internet, access. BTW, it took the Dutch PTT years to also become interested in that strange new phenomenon "Internet", get actively involved in it ("money, money, money..."), and get used to it, witness how a famous Dutch cartoonist depicted it.
•	The advent of internet over ADSL, VDSL, CTV-cable, and later glass fiber, with speeds upto 1 Gbit/s and at affordable prices, making broadband internet (the 'digital highway') a commodity for the general public.
•	The advent and development of high-quality audio and video streaming services like Spotify, Netflix and many others.
•	The invention, rise, and massive addiction to "smart"phones - which in fact are a pretty dumb things, but also in various respects extremely dangerous (especially for privacy and for disseminating the most blatant nonsense and desinformation) devices - and high-speed mobile data networks, along with absolute privacy disasters like Facebook (aka faecesbook), LinkedIn, Instagram ("insta"), TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), Telegram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, and many, many more. And besides being privacy disasters, they can also be dangerous, even lethal, witness the 'Facebook murder' in the Netherlands in 2012 or the 'WhatsApp lynchings' in India. Dating apps too have led to murders, in the majority of cases, as usual, on girls and women: 1) fuck them, 2 kill them, then flee or pay corrupt and trigger-happy "law enforcement".

Internet has had a profound effect on society and has deeply pervaded the life of zillions of people. So much so that the abbreviations "DNA" and "SMS" have got brand-new meanings: "Digital Network Addiction" resp. "Social Media Stress". Even so: enjoy it, but be aware that the internet has also - and worldwide for a large part for ignorant, superstitious, conspiracy-addicted people - (no-brainers for short) become a playground of preference for criminals and lunatics, and a vehicle for the most serious threats to privacy, health, personal life and freedom, and in particular for (s)extortion.
Do realize that governments - including your own and foreign ones - are monitoring and collecting your data traffic, your whereabouts, literally your everything. And not only governments do so, cameras, doorbells, tv-sets, solar panels, they all have private information about you, track you and your activities, often sending those data to countries where you'd really never want them, including neo-nazi states like Russia, Iran and Israel. And don't make yourself illusions that such devices are in any way secure and privacy-friendly. Sure enough, they appear to be so, but that merely is the way they're described in ads ("the louder and the more convincing, the better"). However, reality and trustworthiness really are entirely different things. And your highly personal "smart"phone? That may well be or become infected by ransomware or spyware, including the already mentioned phone-intruding "child porn detecting" software (read: malware).
Interestingly, whilst the Netherlands have played a forefront role in the adaptation and spreading of the Internet, and a key Internet Exchange is still located in Amsterdam, it is now (a^o 2023/2024) lagging in a humiliating way in the adaptation of a modern Internet protocol like IPv6, of secure DNS, etc.
Here is must add - of confess - though that I myself don't have IPv6 enabled, but for a good reason: reverse-mapping for IPv6 is conspicuouely lacking, so you're left in the limbo as to where/whom/what remote system or piece of software you're connecting to.
But at the good side, SIDN and SIDN Labs have worked hard on new protocols and services to make the Internet a better, safer, and nitwit-proof place. But let's be real: it's an arms race against criminals, often government- driven or at least facilitated, and similar types, the kind of hominids commonly known as "influencers" and often looking like plastic dolls, etc. are working hard to disrupt the real, useful Internet. Internet has become a perfect place for disinformation, medical (!) and "healthy food" nonsense, theft (data and financial), gambling, addiction to the worst possible shit and (addictive and even lethal) substances, including smoking and (even more) "vaping" (for youngsters usually the first step to addictive smoking), etc. But also to the nonsense spread/promoted by official organizations. Here I'm referring to what is commonly called "biological food". That's sheer nonsense though, because a) the opposite of "biological" is "synthetic", and synthetic food doesn't exist, and b) the human digestive tract is not suitable for this "biological" food, which in practice comes down to (almost) only eating vegetables, made edible by the addition of truckloads of spices and taste-suppressing additions. The only reason why "biological" is a success is he massive PR by commerce and by official institutes who really should get better informed and more scientific research instead of blindly repeating ad infinitum the desinformation spread by the masses. Really, the human digestive tract is not suitable for digesting vegetables only: too short, inapt to digest [the cellulose] cell walls of vegetable (which is why ruminants like e.g. cows have seven (!) stomachs and ruminate their food.
On quite another, extremely important subject, about misogyny, brute force, discrimination and other misbehaviour against/towards females, including the most abject maltreatment and even strangling, stabbing or shooting them to death, even if they're pregnant. Even in "civilized" countries, there is widespread discrimination, abuse and raping of women and girls. And worst of all: the nazi-like practice - and even laws  of denying women even the most basic female right of abortion, even when the pregnant woman's life is in danger or a stake, in some cases going as far as "laws" putting a penalty of 99 years (!) in jail - which obviously boils down to a lifelong delayed death after bars or lifelong postponed murder - after having gone through the utterly harsh procedure of abortion. And that even when that abortion literally saved her life, as in the case of an ectopic pregnancy leading to massive blood loss due to a ruptured Fallopian tube. In those states - with in the US Texas as the worst example - and countries where women are regarded and (mal)treated as simply nothing more than (sex) objects, inferior creatures, existing (or rather: sort of existing) only for the sexual "needs" (read: pleasures and satisfaction) of men and for producing ever more offspring, adding to the world's already huge overpopulation and eventually to its destruction.
The video mentioned further on in the Free a Girl support entry is a paramount and blood-chilling example of how cell blobs wrongly and euphemistically regarding and calling themselves as "real men". In reality however they're just devils, equipped with an uncontrolled and hyperactive sex drive and without even the slightest idea about "humanity". And even worse and humiliating is the situation in Afghanistan, where women are considered and treated as property of men, "needing" their "protection", not allowed to go out without "male" accompaniment, treated as their (sex) slaves, deprived of all things normal in life, like any form of education, work and personality, and, in a most humiliating addition to that, forced to dress in a way that keeps their bodily shapes hidden and invisible. Or almost: hiding their often big breasts from view with a thin, loose-hanging shapeless dress is doomed to fail.
At the same time there is the really shameful situation that organizations that are crucial for society and social functioning, like banks, health care (including hospitals), authorities on various levels, etc. are explicitly or in fact forcing people, including in particular the elderly, to use digital means, in particular "smart"phones ("the more complex, the better"). Some of the victims of such policies simply have no idea of the risks they're running, like having their private data stolen and abused, and even getting robbed of money they've been saving up over a long period of hard working. Sadly, the usual official response is "we can't help you, you have to solve it yourself". And their (grand)children very often live in an entirely different, and in many respects unreal, digital world. Which boils down to them not caring at about such trivialities like security and privacy, and considering it too much work or even a waste of time to educate or at least help their grandparents, or simply lack the knowledge to really help them.
To end this section: what does this all have to do with internet? Well, that should be all too clear by now: in all the mentioned bad, misogynistic, lying (often identical to nonsense-spreading), anti-social activities and threats, internet is the carrier, the "electronic channel", the driving, misguiding and misleading digital roadway. A commodity, yes, but in many respects the most negative and most dangerous of all its comparables and look-alikes (real or fake) and their predecessors.

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Bas Kist	domeinnamen.nl	ISBN 9789057593932
Peter van Dijk /    Erik-Jan Gelink	Gekte.com	ISBN 9789025415488
Monique Doppert	Internet Pioniers	ISBN 9789075727869
Christiaan Alberdingh Thijm	Het nieuwe informatierecht	ISBN 9789039522493
Cordula Rooijendijk	Alles moest nog worden uitgevonden	ISBN 9789045013671
Peter Olsthoorn	25 jaar internet in Nederland	ISBN 9789492280008
Martin Wainwright	April Fool's Day	ISBN 9781845133443

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This website used to include a comprehensive Beertema family tree (Dutch: stamboom) and its related family trees. Many years of genealogical research irrefutably showed the family name "Beertema" to be unique worldwide, with every individual bearing this name being member of one and the same family.
The family name started with Leendert Eppes Beertema in 1811, when Napoleon decreed it mandatory for every family that didn't have a family name to choose and register one. Previously individuals were named "son of" / "daughter of" followed by their father's name.
The family's lineage could be traced back much further, to ±1600, to a couple in the village of Blijham, in the Eastern part of Groningen, the husband (Lendert Synts (several spellings have been found) being from Nesserland (an island in the Ems/Eems, facing the city of Emden, Germany) and his spouse (Gepke Hermens) from Dersum (also Germany). As far as I know no research has been done in German archives into pre-1600 lineage. Nesserland later became part of the expanding city of Emden, but its name lives on in the street name "Nesserlander Straße" along Emden's harbour.

Sadly, I had to decide to take all the family trees, compiled & maintained as a hobby in more than 20 years, offline due to new EU privacy regulations. And a couple of years later, with my health declining and no family member willing to equally conscientiously maintain them and not publish them on any of the insane "social" media, I took the ultimate, irreversible, but also saddening step of deleting them all beyond recovery.

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...than just technology. Life in particular is about humanity. Or at least: should be about humanity. Most governments and leaders however don't care about humanity, or only pretend to do so for personal or financial profit, e.g. through mendacious pr ads, paid "influencers", etc. So it's up to serious organizations that focus on practical forms of humanity and fighting abuses, through active participation in them and/or by donating to them. Fortunately there are lots of such organizations. Some that I would recommend supporting or donating to are listed below.

Note  Some of the sites listed have one or more issues, like: (partly) not working with some privacy-friendly browsers; content and/or interaction of NL sites not (fully) in Dutch; poor reachability (website and/or organization); site written without knowledgeof "backward compatibility". Even so I've included the links to those sites, because I consider goal and activities - an active and desperately needed way of practical humanity, especially towards females - to be infinitely more important than some technical or language issues. I should add though that, if an organization I've donated to starts sending me spam - including begging for more - I immediately remove it from this list.

» One serious warning should be given here: the Free a Girl videos contain shocking images and language and therefore are not suitable for youngsters and the faint of heart!  «

EN: Free a Girl   video		NL: Free a Girl   video
EN: Amref - FGM		NL: Amref - VGV
EN: Terre des Hommes		NL: Terre des Hommes
EN: A Different Jewish Voice		NL: Een ander Joods geluid
EN: The Rights Forum		NL: The Rights Forum
EN: Eye Care Foundation		NL: Eye Care Foundation
EN: Médecins Sans Frontières		NL: Artsen zonder Grenzen

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The Greek motto at the top of the page is a quote from Olympia I, one of the Odes of the ancient lyric poet Pindar (ca. 518 BC - 438 BC). It roughly translates as: "The highest boon is the blessing of every day".

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all good things must have an end