Kilnam Chon brought the internet to Asia. And you’d have to say the move was successful.
In South Korea — where Chon led a research team that installed the
first two nodes on Asia’s first internet protocol network — broadband
connections are used in over 95 percent of households,
a figure that eclipses every other country on earth. Singapore, Taiwan,
and Hong Kong aren’t far behind, and all cast a shadow over the US,
where broadband reaches about 60 percent of our homes.
Chon is also the founding father of multiple organizations that still drive the Asian internet — including the Asia Pacific Networking Group and Asia Pacific Top Level Domain Name Forum
— and earlier this year, in recognition of his role in bringing the
continent online, he was inducted into the inaugural class of the
Internet Society’s (ISOC) Internet Hall of Fame, alongside such as names
as Vint Cerf, Van Jacobson, Steve Crocker, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and Elizabeth Feinler.
Though he pioneered the Asian internet at the Korea Institute of
Electronics Technology, Chon isn’t Korean, and he spent his formative
years outside the country. He was born and raised in Japan, and he
completed his education in the US. After receiving a bachelor’s degree
in engineering from Japan’s Osaka University in 1965, he enrolled in the
fledgling computer science program at the University of California at
Los Angeles, where many say the internet was born.
Chon tells us that at UCLA, he studied with Leonard Kleinrock,
who oversaw the team that sent the first message across the ARPAnet,
the US-Department-of-Defense-funded network that eventually morphed into
the modern-day internet. But Chon wasn’t involved with the ARPAnet
during his nine years at the University. He says the time wasn’t right
for a foreigner like him to work on a US military network. “It was the
time of the Vietnam War,” he says.
But after he moved to Korea in the late 1970s and joined the new
Korea Institute of Electronics Technology — a government-funded
laboratory dedicated to computer and semiconductor research and
development — he and his colleagues built their own network. In 1980,
his team proposed a national network to the Korean Government’s Ministry
of Commerce and Industry, and the idea was shot down. But a revised
proposal was accepted a year later, and they soon began work on what was
then called the Software Development Network, or SDN.
Crucially, the team chose to build the network using the TCP/IP
protocol that researchers in the States — most notably Vint Cerf and Bob
Kahn — had built for a revised incarnation of the ARPAnet. According to
Chon, they settled on TCP/IP because their network was part of a larger
computing research project that was based on the UNIX operating system
and TCP/IP dovetailed nicely with UNIX. But the pick paid added
dividends in the decade to come, when TCP/IP gave rise to the internet
as we know it today.
In the early ’80s, the United Kingdom and Norway also followed the
ARPAnet’s move to TCP/IP, but Chon’s SDN was the first network to use
the protocol outside of the US and Europe. The network went live in
1982, before the ARPAnet was officially converted to the internet
protocol. By 1985, it was connecting about 20 universities, national
research laboratories, and corporate labs. And two years later, it was
plugged into several other parts of Asia, including Australia,
Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong.
It was also plugged into the US, but not with TCP/IP. In those days,
it talked to the States using a dial-up connection based on the
Unix-to-Unix Copy, or UUCP, protocol. A TCP/IP connection didn’t arrive
until the first leased line between the Korea and the US was activated
in 1990.
But Kilnam Chon didn’t seed the Asian internet. He was the driving
force behind its evolution throughout the ’80s and well beyond. In 1985,
he was the program chair of the Pacific Computer Communications
Symposium, one of the first global internet conferences — and the last
for several years. In 1991, he founded the Asia Pacific Networking
Group, an organization whose sole purpose was to advance networking in
the region. And in 1999, he launched the Asia Pacific Top Level Domain
Consortium, which oversees the continent’s internet domain names.
No, he never worked on the ARPAnet. But he worked on something far bigger.
