Hello.

(...) and I come from Oulu, which is a town of about hundred thousand inhabitants in northern Finland, close to Lapland. (...)

I've just turned 21 years old and have been using the Internet and earlier computer mediated means of communication and living almost a half of my life. I believe this fact and the Internet boom of last five years have had a tremendous effect on me and that's what I came to talk you about. I have a lot of questions to which I seek different answers and I hope that this presentation will rise some in you.

Background, about Finland etc:

After spending some time and later living abroad I got to notice that what I once thought was normal living and environment appears to be quite exotic for many people. Besides nature also social structures and the standards and use of technology are quite different compared to what I have experienced in for example central Europe. (...)

(I believe that our special, artic, living conditions play a role in the development of telecommunication in northern Finland.)  It seems that the people that are sometimes mentioned being the most silent in the world start to babble when they get their mobile phones. The (in)famous IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was also born and is extremely widely used in my home town. Also other technology, like ATM bank machines and nowadays on-line banking services, seem to be easily adapted by people there. On top of all this the technology image has been also artificially emphasized by many campaigns to attract international attention to our projects. It is quite easy to understand as high technology is nowadays perhaps the only thing we can really use to participate in global markets in order to maintain our society in the area.

Internet / Computer background:

Today the Internet is not about computers, at least not for me, but to get introduced to it in the beginning of 90's you had to be quite involved. We definitely were. The story is quite typical: first contact with computers was the Commodore family. First some games with my older cousin at the age of six and after a couple of years we, me and my brother that is, got our own. Besides games we did some simple programming at the age of ten, eleven or so.

Then when I was twelve, turning to thirteen, this one new boy moved to the neighbourhood and came to our class. He was already familiar with, not only computers, but modems and the world of 'boxes' (bbs's, bulleting board systems) we had only heard about. Afters first reading 'messages' (that's how we called the Fidonet flow, comparable to Usenet News today) for hours and hours at their house above his shoulder I finally got to buy my own modem and dive into the world he'd introduced me to.

The daily routine changed: I stopped watching TV late night shows but started going to bed early(!) to get up about 6am. to poll new messages, have breakfast and read the newspaper meanwhile, then checking the messages that had come (polling, or downloading them took usually about 20 minutes with my 2400bps modem) and perhaps writing some before going to school. You probably wonder why I didn't stay up late then, like computer people usually do? The simple answer is that those BBS's hardly ever had more than one line which was usually free only at that time. I guess it was also nice to in a way combine the newly printed newspaper and the discussions we had often about the same topics -- but I don't think I really realized it that way back then being only about fourteen years old.

Many BBS's at the time were independent 'islands' and actually did they job pretty well that way. I guess we sometimes feel the need some kind of closed societies and SysOp's care-taking like the talk of Virtual Communities quite often suggests. Anyhow the networks started to get more interesting. The ones we schoolkids got to use back then were technically FidoNet based. One was the Fido itself, the we had the national Finnish SF. (Suomi-Fido) groups and a lot of locals (CL. for Circus Laplandia etc.). Later on we changed to UUCP and joined nullnet which used Internet type addresses and provided Usenet feed for those who could afford it. Most of us couldn't but we had the local pulp.nullnet groups instead (pulp as in pohjolan uljaat pojat, brave boys of the north :)

I guess the local groups were often most interesting since those were people that we soon started to do things with. There was always a lot of meetings and parties so that the virtual community became real. Many of those groups of friends exist even today.

At the time I had already had my first contact with the global Internet. I was fourteen and at the university for one week from school to see what working there was like. Naturally I had chosen the computer centre where I got to know some basics of that kind of networking. Of course I had heard what it was like but still having immediate access all over the world felt amazing. We were used to dialup systems that changed new information perhaps once or twice a day with the node above and international traffic was not only slow (took days) but also higly unreliable. My job back then was to use FTP to get up-to-date information about Internet connectivity, I still remember printing out the maps and showing them to some people there. After that week my account was valid for one month but for FTP only.

I have to admit that it was not before IRC got big in Oulu that I was really interested about the Internet. The access was a trouble and the (academic) newsgroups, yet they sure were interesting, felt quite remote for a fourteen year old. But when we, thanks to some friendly people at the university, started getting limited access to their systems. Actually the server we got to use was the very first IRC server there ever was, tolsun.oulu.fi, through a limited menu system called OuluBox with time restrictions.

Most of the people I knew from the local Fido- and UUCP systems already so basicly the only difference was that we now got to be on-line simultaneously hence more interactive. IRC is also a lot more concurrent by nature, quite common use was to log in around six or seven on a friday night to discuss with the group where to party that night, meet there in few hours and gather again on-line after the night before going to sleep. Amazing amounts of alcohol was involved.

Later on, I guess I was sixteen, we got unlimited UNIX shell access and went crazy about it. We learned how to use "screen" that allows using several programs on a single terminal and is actually still the way my net being is built. Screen enabled us to use e-mail, news and the early www more confortably since /quitting IRC was quite often out of the question. Some sessions during christmas holidays (freezing cold and constantly dark outside, nothing to do, cheap phone calls and lots of mandarins!) lasted days.

At the time we were perhaps more global than ever since. The IRC (efnet) was not so crowded by Finns yet (even though we were a kind of minor majority :) and the lag to #texas (my friend's favourite), #aussies or South Africa (where I got my best friend at the time) was a mere two seconds.

Until 1993 we were only computer geeks and yes, boys. I remember only one exception, one girl who started ircing at the age of 13/14(?) and kept on for some years. We were also totally dependent on university and other schools that luckily gave some people access even though they were not oblidged to. But then everything changed. The OuluNet (www.oulu.net), the school network in Oulu, got started. It was initiated and run by Jukka Orajarvi who was and still is working for the (www.otol.fi).

Actually some guys of my age had cracked some passwords on his (the school's, that is) machines to gain access but got caught. The best thing Jukka could come up with was to give them access but also responsibility for maintaining some systems. He and some enthusiasts from some of the high schools also decided to try connecting schools with first slow (19.2kbps) modems with SLIP and putting up small unix servers to the schools to provide Internet services for the kids. And, most suprisingly, the maintainers were us -- some 16/17 year old nerds.

So by 1993/94 Oulu became, I believe, one of the first places in Europe to give children from 12/13 to 18/19 (upper preliminary and high school) and occasionally even younger unlimited Internet access -- also from home! At first the teachers didn't know much about it though. The initiative came from outside and the system: the whole technical solutions, maintenance, teaching and support, ethical questions etc. were our trouble. Actually the first job for many of us was the courses lead by Jukka in summer '94 when we, by the time professionals, were teaching our own teachers the basics of the Internet on our holiday. The same summer we had a workshop that produced, for example, the first web pages of the City of Oulu with connections to a database with all ...

The OuluNet project was an important experiment and is considered succesful. Actually Jukka Orajarvi got awarded of it last year, ie. three years later.
By the end of the year 1994 the structure was pretty much there and since then the Internet has established to be a part of school activities. We, the group of first pupil maintainerswas, were going to graduate soon but in most of the schools new enthusiasts were already there learning their job.

There was also growing demand for services outside of the schoolworld so we, a group of ten from the schools, decided to found a company, Net People Oy, by the end of 1994. That's how we continued being (working) together for the following years. Net People's history is quite colourful like I'd guess most of the Internet startups to be. The people and the profile has changed dramatically a couple of times and the company today is quite different than where it got started from. For me the freedom and the ultimate challenges it offered was crucial.

maintenance, business, services, projects, contacts, tougher knowledge, travelling - teaching, .. yet the community (homepages, irc etc)

95/96-> helsinki .. international interests, business slowdown,
 ministry of telecommunication, house of knowledge, ...
97 -> abroad
98 -> 5 years

A perspective from a homepage, fall'97: