{"id":2040,"date":"2020-05-12T13:29:25","date_gmt":"2020-05-12T11:29:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wpethzprd.ethz.ch\/its\/?p=2040"},"modified":"2020-05-12T13:29:27","modified_gmt":"2020-05-12T11:29:27","slug":"email-is-useless-obstacles-facing-the-pioneers-at-eth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/its\/2020\/05\/12\/email-is-useless-obstacles-facing-the-pioneers-at-eth\/","title":{"rendered":"«Email is useless» – Obstacles facing the pioneers at ETH"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The ETH has been one of the top ten technical universities for many years and is constantly hitting the headlines with its new innovations. And yet it was only just under 30 years ago that ETH had no internet or email. In one of our last posts<\/a><\/strong>, we created a timeline to illustrate the arrival of the internet at our university. It takes pioneers to make these kinds of developments happen. One such pioneer was Walter Gander, who shared his experiences back in the day of the emails and websites with us for this article. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

A university without internet \u2013 is it even possible?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Summaries, old exams, research \u2013 today’s\nstudents don’t know a world without internet. Thirty years ago, however, things\nlooked very different. Back then, people still thought you were a freak if you\nknew what the internet was. It was an event in Scandinavia in 1989 that set ETH\nZurich’s connection to the internet in motion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Walter Gander, then Professor of Scientific\nComputing at the newly founded D-INFK, travelled to Norway for a NATO workshop\non supercomputing. During the breaks, many of his colleagues were able to check\ntheir emails, as their email servers were connected to the Arpanet or already\nconnected to the internet. In Switzerland, this was not yet the case. No sooner\nhad Walter Gander returned, than he grabbed a pen and paper and wrote a letter\nto Ralf H\u00fctter, Vice President of Research, expressing his wish: Switzerland\nand the ETH must be connected to the INTER-NET! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

«The workshop participants could, for example, easily read\nand edit their mail in San Diego, Argonne, etc. It seems that an INTER-NET\nconnection is not dependant on whether the country is a NATO member. I think we\nshould connect to it if possible.»<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Extract
Extract from Walter Gander’s letter to Prof. Dr. R. H\u00fctter<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Walter Gander was not the only one to push for the ETH to get\nhooked up to the internet. Some of his colleagues also wanted this, and the ETH\nwas connected to the internet in the autumn of the same year. The first\ninternet service provider in Switzerland was the SWITCHlan university network,\nwhich was set up by Prof. Bernhard Plattner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Communicating with students<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Our current situation really highlights\njust how important the internet and especially email can be for universities.\nFor weeks now, lecturers have been mainly communicating with their students via\nemail, which can be accessed from home thanks to the internet. What many people\nprobably don’t know, is that email actually arrived at ETH before the internet.\nHowever, it wasn’t until a few years later that email was made accessible to\nstudents. Why did this process take so long?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Walter Gander was also a driving force in\nthis regard. He knew that emails were an important means of communication to\nhelp stay connected with his colleagues from all over the world. ETH already\nhad access to email, but it was only used sporadically, as not everyone had\nrealised what it was for yet. This made it all the more difficult to convince\npeople who did not use email, or used it very little, that the students could\nbenefit from it. The majority of D-INFK professors believed that giving\nstudents access to email would only create unnecessary costs. And since they\nthought there was no demand, they wondered what would be the point. It’s now\nhard to understand where they were coming from, but nobody could have predicted\nhow extremely relevant email would be today. For many, email was a gimmick that\nprovided no added value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Walter Gander, on the other hand, didn’t\nwant to give up so easily. In one fell swoop, he finally managed to get some\nattention for his project: The primary reason he gave was that the exercises\ncontaining the assistants‘ programming tasks in Department of Computer Science\nshould be tested electronically for corrections and therefore had to submitted\nin the same way. This, he said, could be done most easily via email!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Walter Gander found support for the\nimplementation in Walter Schaufelberger and Bernhard Plattner. Both were very\ninterested in Gander’s plans. As founder of the organisation Informatik dient\nAllen (IDA) (Information Serves All), Walter Schaufelberger had the necessary\nfinancial means for the trio to turn the dream of «email for\nstudents» into a reality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so it was, that from 1991 all students from the 3rd semester and up had an email account and 20 MB storage space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"An
An example of how emails were sent in 1987. Here you can see the individual stations via which email travels from ETH to Cern. And subsequently to UUCP to Berkeley and from there to Stanford.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

About Walter Gander and the\nhistory of the D-INFK<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Walter Gander studied mathematics at ETH\nZurich and graduated in 1968; he was an assistant and doctoral candidate at the\nETH until 1973. In 1979, he returned to ETH Zurich as a private lecturer, and\nfrom 1987 to 1991 he was an Associate Professor before becoming a Full\nProfessor. In 1989, the ETH was departmentalised and the D-INFK was created.\nWalter Gander founded the Institute for Scientific Computing. The\ninstitute developed into the largest institute of the D-INFK until his\nretirement. In 2008, the Institute was dissolved and various new units such as\nthe Institute for Visual Computing were created. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Links<\/h2>\n\n\n\n