By Avery Mullen - TheMacdonaldNotebook. Halifax - Published 2023-01-08
Al Gore made a famous comment that he alone invented the Internet. At the time he was VP of the United States of America, in the Bill Clinton administration.
It was not the case and political pundits lampooned Gore's historical inaccuracy.
But this story is historically accurate: The Man Who Brought The Internet To Nova Scotia - Dan MacKay Helped Bring the Internet to Nova Scotia.
When Daniel MacKay was configuring routers in places like Yarmouth and Cape Breton as part of the early rollout of the internet in Nova Scotia three decades ago, he says the most stressful part of the process was the 18-minute wait to see if the equipment would work properly.
MacKay was manager of the Network Operations Centre at Dalhousie University, which had been contracted by the company Nova Scotia Technology Network, to install internet infrastructure across the province.
MacKay and his team used public buildings like libraries and community centres because those institutions were more stable than private businesses that could close or be sold.
A teacher confers with a student at the Parkview Education Centre in Bridgewater — Dan MacKay's alma mater — after installing an internet connection in 1991. As manager of the Network Operations Centre at Dalhousie University, MacKay helped roll out internet systems across the province.
Every time MacKay installed a new router — a machine analogous to a digital interchange connecting metaphorical highways of internet cabling — he and the technician he was working with would wait to see if their configuration would work as the device communicated with equipment at Dalhousie University.
“My techie would drive to Yarmouth, unpack everything …connect the modem (device that sends converts computer signals into a format that can be sent over a network), push the power button, and we would wait,” MacKay tells The Notebook.
“If anything went wrong, if you’d made a mistake in the configuration, the thing was just dead.
“And the dude would have to pack it all back up and bring it to Halifax. That never happened, but every time it was stressful.”
His career in technology began in 1981 when he enrolled in Dalhousie’s bachelor of computer science program and discovered a precursor of the internet called Usenet, which he describes as essentially a social network that used phone lines to send data.
Budding netizens who signed up to Usenet could join interest-specific discussion groups. For example, MacKay says, a group of bonsai tree enthusiasts in Halifax might form a Usenet group to share cultivation techniques.
As an example of the type of community he found in the world of computers, MacKay cites one memorable 1992 incident in which he turned to a Usenet-based LGBT discussion group to locate a recipe for a Jewish couple with whom he was friends. Both lawyers, they did not have time to cook, so MacKay sometimes made Jewish for them.
He came to Usenet armed only with a description that the recipe was for a desert that included “a big ball with little balls in it.” But a woman in New York correctly identified the dish as taiglach
Daniel MacKay is the publisher of the Halifax Rainbow Encyclopedia, which includes “a page for every person, place, thing and event of interest to the LGBT community in Halifax ever.” He oversaw the rollout of some of the first-ever internet infrastructure in Nova Scotia when he managed a computer networking lab at Dalhousie University. (Photo credit: Trish Spark)
MacKay used that information to find the honeyed pastry in a Jewish cookbook and prepare it for his friends.
Usenet still exists, with modern users accessing it through third-party providers and often prizing it for its sophisticated file sharing capabilities.
MacKay also later created a more localized online community of queer Haligonians when he founded the Halifax Rainbow Encyclopedia — an online database of resources for local LGBT people that describes itself as including, “A page for every person, place, thing and event of interest to the LGBT community in Halifax ever.”
"TCP/IP was turned on 1983-01-01. That’s the anniversary we were celebrating. It was only on U.S. military bases and a very few other places. I was hired in 1989 to build the Internet for the public in Nova Scotia and be on the team building it across Canada," says MacKay
MacKay bagged the Network Operations Centre role in 1989 by approaching his future boss at a career fair and critiquing the other man's promotion of a computer network based on the well-established TCP/IP networking protocols instead of a newer competitor, OSI.
MacKay was mistaken in his criticism — TCP/IP became the foundation on which the modern internet is built — but he did land himself a job.
“I had an interview the next day and I got hired the day after that,” he says. “All for being a cocky bastard.”
Nova Scotia Technology Network was operating as a startup at the time, meaning it was pre-revenue, but funding from federal agency Industry, Science and Technology Canada helped pay for the equipment and early rollout.
In order to install networking gear in the far-flung reaches of Nova Scotia, MacKay had to rely on a separate piece of equipment at Dalhousie to send the router its operating system over the network in a process he describes as nerve-wracking, but gratifying when it worked.
“You could actually see when it made its request for its operating system — it booted its operating system over the net — you could see the modem lights start to blink,” says MacKay. “And so if that happened, it was like, ‘Oh, thank God.’
“Because as soon as it starts to do that, you know it’s almost certainly going to work.”