The Internet reached the Philippines in April 1994 while I was working there at the U.S. Information Agency Regional Printing Center. Ten universities had banded together to create TCP/IP network they called “PHNet” and it was connected the Internet via a 64Kbs fiber optic cable running across the Pacific Ocean to California.

My agency, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA/USIS) provided financial and technical support to the universities. I wasn’t involved with that, but by virtue of being known as a computer geek I was invited to the roll-out of PHnet at Ateneo University in late April 1994 were I met those involved in the start-up, including Willy Gan, whose company ComNet had supplied the routers and Benjie Tan of Comnet who actually flipped the switch to connect PHnet with the Internet for the first time. I rode to the demo with a USIS officer and the head of International Internetworking for the National Science Foundation who had come to Manila for the launch to lecture and train.

I've been working computers since high school in the late 60s and started creating printing business database applications in BASIC in 1978 before the birth of the IBM PC. I introduced the first computers to the USIA overseas printing operation in 1983 by going to Radio Shack and buying a TSR 80 Model 100 portable with my own money so I could create some of the same applications I had written in the private sector. While in Manila for my first tour as Production Manager and Deputy Director of the 140-person USIA printing center I installed the first PC and created complex spreadsheet databases in Lotus 1-2-3. Back in Washington in 1987 I switching our office to Macs networked with AppleTalk in 1987 and started experimenting with "DeskTop Publishing". In 1990 when I returned to Manila as Admin. Officer I brought with me Macs, Imagesetters, QuarkXpress pages layout software which I networked together using a coax and twisted-pair Ethernet. In 1990 I also discovered the FileMaker database application which I used to replace my existing spreadsheet and over the rest of my career use to automate every aspect of USIA/State overseas printing. So yes, I was a computer geek, but one who operated outside of, and was usually fighting, the IT bureaucracy.

The demo at Ateneo showcased the then new graphic browser concept "Netscape". As a long-time database developer I immediately grasped how linked HTML documents made the entire Internet a distributed relational database of information. As a manager of a major printing operation shipping three-million pounds of color magazines and books to Embassies world-wide I realize that sooner or later the Internet and web-browser would put us out of business if we where not proactive and embraced the technology.

On the way home from that demo I stopped a bookstore in the university belt looking for any books about the Internet and found an 800 page tome called the "Internet Systems Handbook" written by David Lynch, Vint Cerf, Jon Postel who had had a role in creation it and the TCP/IP and other protocols. Since I was already familiar with networking for Ethernet I had no problem absorbing the contents like a sponge - I have near total recall of technical stuff I read. Within a couple weeks, with the assistance of Willy Gan and PHnet to work out the specifics on equipment and cost, I put together a plan for a TCP/IP intra-net / internet gateway for the Embassy and presented to my Admin / IT Officer peers at the Embassy in May 1994. It was at the end of that meeting the manager of the Ateneo system gave me his card with the information needed to log into an account on the Ateneo server. Later that afternoon in May 1994 I dialed in an connected to the Internet for the first time - with a book of UNIX commands on my lap.

Just after doing the pitch to create an Intranet in Manila I returned to the U.S. for scheduled consultations in Washington and a two-month of Home Leave spent at my condo in Florida (one of the perks of serving in a hardship post). I briefed my office director on what we had been doing and impressed he arranged for me to meet with the deputy directors of USIA for Administration and Programs. I pitched the idea of setting up the Intranet / Internet gateway for the Manila Mission and another one I had for making our printing plant a supply of turn-key Internet server solutions for other overseas USIS Missions. In countries not yet reached by the Internet the USIS post could set up a server and modems, seed the necessary browser technology, and by mirroring content establish themselves as a TCP/IP based source of information, both news and the "how do I get connected to the Net?" information the third-world would soon be clamoring for... Seemed like a win-win for USIA, whose mission was Public Diplomacy via direct contact with the people. My dog and pony show for the top brass impressed them sufficiently to obtain permission to buy a Sparc20 server and connect to the Internet when I returned.

One of the advantages of managing a cutting edge printing operation was not needed to spend my own money for computer gear so in 1994 my only personal computer was still the Radio Shack portable I bought 11 years earlier. So while on leave in Florida I bought a Mac, 28k modem and got a Netcom account. On Netcom in a usenet Mac forum I ran across a guy in the Navy who was stationed 10 miles away who became an amazing resource. He had a Masters in Physics from MIT and had on diskette every shareware application available for the Mac. He came over to my place, loaded up my Mac with applications and showed me how to use them. He also showed me how to access the MIT Athena server which at the time had some of the best tutorials on HMTL and Internet protocols available.

While in Florida on leave I also discovered the Soc.Culture.Filipino usenet group and got to know the small band of net savvy Filipinos from around the world who were connected to the net back then. There weren’t many, mostly people working in the IT field and university students in the U.S.

By the time I returned back to Manila in July 1994 I’d taught myself HTML and started to create web pages. The only problem was there was no web servers at Ateneo at the time, and the connection did not allow the use of Netscape, only a text-only browser. With experimentation I found I could host HTML pages out of my shell account at Ateneo using a ftp:// URL, so I started creating and posting the first web pages hosted in the Philippines

On my return I started working with Willie Gan and Benjie Tan to get our office connected to the net. The cost to connect as a node was prohibitive. The local telco charged $3,000 per month for a leased 56k line across town and connecting to the PHnet would cost another $3,000. The clever work-around they came up with was to bind two 28k modems over regular dial-up phone lines with a router on both sides, giving us the same net band-width for about $30 per month with the telco no wiser. When we got our Sparc20 server I set it up in their office, on the Internet node, instead of in our office over the modems - a early version of data farming.

Willie and his team of mostly recent college IT grads were putting together what would become the first commercial provider, Mozcom.com but didn’t have anyone on their staff who knew how to create web pages. So I offered to create sites for both Mozcom and ComNet for the roll out of Mozcom in early Sept 1994 and also designed their printed brochures. So I could develop the web site Willie gave me private dial-in line with PPP and root access (total control) over the Mozcom web server. I became the de facto Mozcom web master.

When the Mozcom site went live in September 1994 is was one of only about 5,000 sites on the entire Internet and I was one of the few people in the Philippines who had 24/7 access to the Net... For free!

There were a few other sites created by the universities but the Mozcom site and another I created for Willie's networking company where the first commercial ones. The following month while exchanging e-mail messages with a guy I met on Soc.Culture.Filipino he suggested creating a web page for the group for FAQs and links to other info of interest to Filipino. Since I had access I knocked out a quick page of links and with a banner created in Photoshop, put it one the server and announced it to the Usenet group. It only had about five links, the number of Filipino pages on-line at the time, but is was a huge hit- quite literally. People in the U.S. trying to access it created, inadvertently, the first "denial of service" attack on the narrow 64Kbps bandwidth PHnet.

In late 1994 and early 1995 I created demo free "seed" sites for people and companies who had gotten Mozcom accounts to try generate content to link to. One of the first pages I created was for Philippine National Steel Company was a client of Mozcom. I had conversed on-line with its IT guys from there and offered to do a web page. They got approval, emailed me a few photos and I created a information / contact site. A month or so later the site got mentioned in an Asia Business Week article about the emergence of the net in Asia, citing Philippine Steel as being ahead of the curve. The funny part was that PNS executives hadn’t even seen their page yet themselves because they were still on a text-only shell account.

The ABW article was a wake-up call for businesses and media outlets in the Philippines who at that point where largely ignorant about it. More than anything I wanted to see the media get on line so I facilitated a joint USIS/Mozcom demonstration of the net. The USIS press office invited it's media and govt. contacts and provided a speaker from the U.S. Willie provided access and picked up the tab for the venue and I wrote and had our plant print a 16-page handout in to explain the Internet. That's when I coined the word “Cyberbayan” (virtual-homeland in Taglog) to describe the worldwide community of expat Filipinos who where already on it who where looking for information from home.

The demo played to a packed ballroom at the Diamond Hotel in July 1995. Parts of my handout wound up being reprinted in all the major papers. It was the first extensive coverage of the net in the mainstream media and interest in the Internet really took off after that. USIS was inundated with requests for more information so I quickly put together a two-day free seminar on HTML and running a web site with a on-line notes, resource links, and an HTML primer which was held at the USIS library. It was attended by 70 people, including the entire IT staff of the President of the Philippines.

Unfortunately for me just as Internet wave in the Philippines had started to crest in the summer of 1995 my five-year assignment in Manila came to its end and I returned back to the Washington office. I continued to maintain an index of Filipino sites and moved it to the “cyberbayan.org” domain I had registered. By October 1997 search engines had replaced the index model and my Cyberbayan page which had by then grown to over 700 and became obsolete and difficult to maintain as people moved their sites around. So I retired the index and converted the content to personal stories and photos about the Philippines. In 1997 the Philippines were a featured country at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and there was a Centennial celebration on Pennsylvania Ave. in DC in front of the FBI building. I photographed it and created a web pages to display them.

I returned to Manila in the Summer of 1999 for my third and final assignment as Director of the USIA printing plant, which a short time later was re-merged into the State Department. In 2000 I bought first digital camera and participated on a Yahoo group for Philippine photography where I ran into many people I knew from my Internet evangelism during the previous assignment. I posted tips I’d learned working as an apprentice and assistant to world renowned wedding photographer Monte Zucker and got invited to teach a hands-on class. Since I was using a Kodak digital camera at the time I called Kodak Philippines and got them to sponsor it and host it at their location. I did a second expanded class at the 2001 Philippine Graphic Expo where I was also the keynote speaker (by virtue of being director of the Embassy printing operation). The on-line hand-out I created for that class became the start of my photo tutorial web site A Holistic Approach to Lighting and Digital Photography

Before leaving Manila in 2001 I was invited to speak at “One Internet Day”, the 7th anniversary of the start-up of the net. That gave me an opportunity to have lunch with Benjie Tan. I also had a chance to meet and break bread with Willie Gan, whose vision, hard work and knowledge fostered the early growth of the Philippine net. Sadly he was lost to cancer a year later, far too early.

Ironically I never did much on the Internet for USIA. I got our printing plant connected in late 1994 and created web pages for USIS Manila and USIS Jakarta before USIA headquarters had put up a web site. When setting up a domain I had tried to get the USIA IT people to give me a host name under the usia.gov domain (i.e., rsc-manila.usia.gov) but was rebuffed. I didn’t want to register a U.S. govt site under .ph and it didn’t fit under .org, .com, or .edu either. So in early 1995 I submitted a request to the .gov registrar, then at GSA, for “rsc-manila-usia.gov”. Back then most didn’t grasp the difference between “.” (host name) and that by using “-” instead made the domain I requested and received a top level .gov domain on par with USIA.

Things hit the skids politically and bureaucratically when Federal Computer Week, which had learned of the USIS sites and my evangelism, featured my efforts in a 1995 article. That didn't sit well with the controlling bureaucrats back in D.C. who told us to disconnect the web server, derailing any further development efforts for several years. Much to my surprise the “rsc-manila-usia.gov” stayed active, even after the merger of USIA back into the State Department in 1999. It wasn't until around 2006 when State did an inventory of all the web sites that it was phased out.

I never made a centavo from my work on the net in the Philippines. When I did get a speaking fee I donated it to to Pearl Buck Foundation for Amerasian kids so there was no conflict of interest with my day job at the embassy. The payoff for me was having access to the net and making hundreds of friends – from 1994-1997 I knew every just about every Filipino with a web page.

I retired from the Foreign Service in the Fall of 2007 with 25 years of service. I continued working part-time in a Civil Service capacity until 2010. I gave up the Cyberbayan domains and now focus my net activities on teaching photography and lighting via my web site Holistic Approach to Lighting and Digital Photography and on photography forums.