Programme

The Internet in South Africa, a historical perspective

Venue: Arts Major lecture theatre, New Arts building, Artillery Road, Rhodes University, Grahamstown
Time: 18:00 on 24^th November 2011

1. Opening and welcome by Dr Saleem Badat, the Rhodes Vice-Chancellor.
2. Introductions and overview by Professor Pat Terry, who will be the "Master of Ceremonies".
   
3. Mike Lawrie - The politics: Why it happened the way it did, and why at Rhodes?
4. The technology - what did it take?
• Randy Bush - behind the scenes in Portland, putting up with people talking about "rooters" and encouraging them to help themselves.
• Alan Barrett - what did it take to set up a standalone dummy DNS for a ZA internet disconnected from the Internet, and what issues were there round the cutover?
• François Jacot-Guillarmod - The Unix/uucp environmemt and how TCP/IP negated the idea of the gateways required in a store and forward environment.
5. Dr Angus Hay - looking back: Fast forward over the following 20 years from someone who was a postgrad student at the University of the Witwatersrand at the time, to someone who is now CTO of Neotel.
6. Closing. Discussion/questions?

Cheese and Wine

Venue: Fountain quad, Rhodes University (immediately adjacent to New Arts building)
Time: immediately after the above presentation

An opportunity to mingle, and to talk shop with some of the people involved.

Walking tour of Rhodes' ICT facilites

Venue: meet on the steps in front of the clock tower
Time: 14:30 on 24^th November 2011

Although anyone is welcome, this is mainly aimed at staff and students at Rhodes.  It is an opportunity to see some of the "behind the scenes" aspects of Rhodes' IT operations.  It'll take the form of a walking tour of campus, with stops in various data  & network distribtion centers, peeks into manholes, etc.  It is also an opportunity to ask questions about our network design, etc.  Please wear a good pair of walking shoes — we'll cover about 3km in 1.5-2 hours.