CWI in Het Klokhuis TV episode on Internet

On 2 November, Steven Pemberton featured in an episode of TV programme 'Het Klokhuis' on Dutch national TV, telling about the early days of the open Internet in Europe, which started at CWI. The interview was broadcast on channel NPO3 at 18.43h.

Steven Pemberton explains: "At the time, we thought Internet was mainly for scientists, and we had no idea it would end up in the living room."

Het Klokhuis (Dutch for "The Apple Core") is an educational daily TV show for primary school children and young teenagers.

You can watch Steven Pemberton in Klokhuis TV (in Dutch) in the 'Het Klokhuis' Internet episode on NPO Start or via the 'Het Klokhuis' webpage with the Internet episode (the scene at CWI starts at 7:46 min.).

Internet History

On 17 November 2023 it will be thirty-five years ago that the Netherlands became the first country in Europe to be connected to the open Internet. Then system administrator Piet Beertema of Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam received the confirmation that CWI - as the first institute outside North-America (*) - officially gained access to NSFnet, an academic computer network that later evolved into the worldwide Internet.

In 2018, CWI published a mini-documentary about this historic event. In this film, two of the people involved - Internet pioneer Teus Hagen and Steven Pemberton, one of the first Internet users in Europe - share their memories and talk about how they look back at that period. In a later stage Steven Pemberton developed important standards for the World Wide Web, one of the most important applications of the Internet. Pemberton: "In retrospect, establishing that first connection was a historic moment, something we did not realize at that time." Other academic and research institutions in the Netherlands and the rest of Europe were connected shortly after CWI.

See also the news item from 2018, CWI celebrates 30 years of open internet in Europe.

(*) after the USA and Canada