“ETSIT: Pioneer of Spain’s First Internet Connection”

20/05/2025

By JUAN QUEMADA

This 2nd of December marks the 39th anniversary of Spain’s first connection to the Internet, as well as the beginning of its rollout, both carried out in 1985 at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros de Telecomunicación (ETSIT) of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), initiated by the author of this article. At that time, email was the flagship service of the new data networks because it greatly sped up communication with other researchers. Emails reached their recipients within minutes, compared to the days it took for letters to arrive.

Spain was joining the EEC (European Economic Community), and the new service proved to be an essential tool for participating in the emerging European projects in which the author and other academics were beginning to engage. At that time, there were numerous data networks that were incompatible with one another and expensive to deploy, such as DECNET, EARN/BITNET, and others. The Internet was rapidly expanding across the US and starting to reach the most advanced European countries.

The solution was to connect to Internet mail, to which the world’s leading universities were already connected, and the author decided to install the first EUNET/USENET node in Spain to have direct access to email, news, and file transfer services on the computers of the newly created Department of Telematics Engineering. The author carried out the installation together with Fernando Fournón. The enormous potential of the new service far exceeded the expectations of the entire department, and Juan Riera, its director, gave his full support to expand it, despite the fact that the Spanish administration officially backed the deployment of the ISO-OSI model, which was not yet operational.

The connection to Internet email via EUNET/USENET was a low-cost solution, known as the “Internet for the poor,” because it required only a telephone modem to access these services. This service originated from the UNIX user network, which Ángel Álvarez, a professor at the UPM Faculty of Computer Science, had helped to spread in Spain. Direct connection to the Internet at that time required a dedicated line, which involved exorbitant costs.

This deployment was the first open email service based on free software to be rolled out in Spain and allowed any computer to connect easily, so that emails could be received directly in the inbox of the computer one was working on, just as we do today. Other networks were only available on the expensive computers made by the companies that had developed them.

In 1985, the first TCP/IP local network deployed in Spain was also established at ETSIT-UPM. This network connected SUN Microsystems workstations and also linked the first email node and other UNIX servers. This was carried out as part of a project with the company Ericsson, which the author led together with Gonzalo León. This network became the seed for the deployment of the Internet in Spain. The network initially expanded to the rest of ETSIT-UPM, then to the wider University City campus, and subsequently to other universities and research centres.

The email node, called Goya, enabled the connection of Spanish universities and research centres to the main Internet services until the great Internet boom of the 1990s. The emergence of the Web in the early 1990s triggered the massive expansion of the Internet, which displaced all other data networks worldwide and in Spain.

In the 1990s, many other Internet deployments began to appear in Spain, such as the ARTIX network in 1991 and the Sideral service from RedIRIS, which provided Internet access by encapsulating TCP/IP over X.25. The first commercial Internet providers also emerged, such as Goya Servicios Telemáticos, founded in 1992 as a spin-off from ETSIT-UPM, Servicom, created in 1994, and the Infovía service offered by Telefónica in 1995. The Internet Users Association (AUI) was also established to represent the growing user community.

Juan Quemada is Professor Emeritus at ETSIT.

On 20 May, a demonstrator illustrating Spain’s first internet connection was inaugurated at the Profesor Joaquín Serna Telecommunications Museum of ETSIT. Details of this initial connection can be found on the museum’s blog.

Source: ETSIT UPM, News, https://short.upm.es/20okj, originally published at its source on 2 December 2024.