On Monday November 17, it was exactly twenty years ago that Europe was connected to the internet.

That day, at half past two in the afternoon, systems manager Piet Beertema of the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam received the now historic e-mail that CWI – as first organization outside the United States – was officially admitted to NSFnet, an academic computer network that later evolved to the worldwide internet.

After years of preparations Beertema and his colleagues succeeded in getting access to the – at the time still American – internet, thanks to good contacts in the network world. American internet pioneer Rick Adams was Beertema’s principal contact to NSFnet. Not long after CWI was connected other academic and research organizations in the Netherlands and the rest of Europe were connected, too. In the Netherlands, SURFnet also played an important role. It was only much later that commercial businesses followed, and individuals had to wait until 1993. CWI became an important network interconnection between Europe and the United States.

Still part of the European internet traffic runs through Science Park Amsterdam, where CWI is located. This traffics flows through the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX).
In 1999 Beertema received the first Royal Decoration ever provided to an internet pioneer: Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion.

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