ABU Convocation Series: Technological Impacts and Opportunities

ABU Convocation Series: Technological Impacts and Opportunities

Annually, university communities in most Anglophone countries look forward to the Convocation ceremony. Usually on this day, graduating students, lecturers, parents, other students and well- wishers gorgeously dress to charmingly look different from the usual working days. It is on this day; even the old professors who are not fussy about the expensiveness of their dresses have to ransack their wardrobes to fish out the most expensive suit or Agbada to mark the momentous occasion. The day is extraordinarily jubilated by all and sundry with smiles worn by everyone including the supposedly security personnel who should look stern and business-like at all times while on duty. This was the scenario played at the Convocation square of Ahmadu Bello University Zaria in the morning of 25^th November 2017.  The graduands, their teachers, relatives, guardians/parents and the entire university and surrounding communities waved at the Convocation procession while thousands of handset-turned-cameras were used for capturing the historic moment. The senate members, Deans and Directors, Council members, Visiting VCs and Important dignitaries led the Convocation procession from the Senate Building to the famous Maman Kontagora Square, the venue of the event.  We were all elated and momentarily forgot our worries and challenges of life until the event was over and then back to stack reality.

ABU convocation ceremony, a supposedly university annual ritual is by no means a national affair, which makes stakeholders to reflect on the past and plan for a better future. From January 2016 to November 2017, ABU had conducted three consecutive Convocation ceremonies; 38^th, 39^th and 40^th convocations, respectively. In 2016 alone, two convocations were celebrated, the 38^th on 30^th January while the 39^th on 26^th November 2016. The 40^th convocation was observed on 25^th November 2017. During these convocations, a total of 41,338 students graduated with different categories of degrees (first and postgraduate degrees) from various academic programs of the university. Among this number, there were 850 PhDs (305 PhDs in 38^th, 289 PhDs in 39^th and 256 PhDs in 40^th) 188 first class and thousands second-class upper division graduands. The 40^th Convocation was the most memorable as it produced the most highly rated first class degree with CGPA of 4.93, a momentous feat that was only attained in the entire 55 – year history of the university. Al-Amin Bashir Bugaje from Katsina was the most coveted graduand who earned the highly graded CGPA of 4.93 from Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. He automatically won NNPC scholarship to read MSc and PhD in any university of his choice within or outside the country. Thanks to the auspicious presence of NNPC group Managing Director, Engr Maikanti Baru, himself, a first class graduate of Mechanical Engineering of ABU in the early 1980s.

Marking these convocations are certainly a giant achievement and unprecedented contribution of highly skilled manpower to national and international labor markets. ABU deserves loudest ovation for this unparalleled accomplishment! This marvelous achievement was attained notwithstanding the economic challenges facing the nation with education sector receiving the heaviest blow. The achievement is largely attributable to the leadership of the indefatigable Vice Chancellor of the university, Professor Ibrahim Garba who is uncompromising in making students graduate as at when due.

First, Prof Garba added flavor to the convocation ceremony by changing the traditional way the convocation lecture was hitherto conducted and made it very attractive to the general public. At the 38^th Lecture series, he pulled the richest African, Alhaji Aliyu Dangote to the university to deliver special convocation lecture. When you say Dangote is a busy man, it is a gross understatement. Undoubtedly, every minute of Dangote’s time costs thousands of Naira and   yet, he was brought to ABU, made to spend more than 48 hours and deliver a very educative, thought-provoking and inspiring lecture to the general public. That singular act of bringing Dangote to ABU opened a window for Dangote to demonstrate his generosity. He denoted ten blocks of students’ hostel to accommodate over two thousand students at the ABU Phase II. As I am writing this piece, the hostel accommodation donated by Dangote is about 90% completed and may likely attract more generosity from this great man of Africa.

At the 39^th convocation lecture series, the VC brought yet another ever busy and famous Jelani Aliyu, as the speaker of the Convocation lecture. Jelani is the legendry Chevy Volt (American) designer of General Motors. That gathering assembled "who is who" in the nation automobile industry, technocrats, politicians and academia. At the 40^th convocation lecture series, Engr Dr. Maikanti Kachalla Baru was the guest speaker. Engr Baru is the Group Managing Director of Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), an alumnus of the university who graduated with first class degree from Mechanical Engineering Department in the early 1980s.

A slight digression to briefly talk about ABU Phase II, let me mention that Dangote’s donation is parallel to the pledge made by General (Rtd) T. Y. Danjuma during the university’s fifty anniversary in 2013. He pledged to make infrastructural development worth N2 billion for the Faculty of Science at the site of ABU phase II. While the pledge is yet to materialize, five years after, all the ABU communities are looking up to the General to redeem his pledge. Yes, I am confident that the General would act his talk sooner than later. This is because T. Y. Danjuma is among the few most generous Generals; we are blessed with in this country. In addition, he is a complete gentleman whose positive impacts are felt nationwide. Perhaps, someone should whisper into the ears of the General as a reminder. We fervently thank you for a swift action, General.

Back to the convocation, Prof Garba’s achievement became possible because of the untiring efforts of the staff, students and the unflinching support from the surrounding communities. These factors provide a relatively perfect working environment, which raised the productivity of both university’s staff and students. It is certainly a difficult accomplishment considering the historical antecedent and relative size of ABU. The university has over 3,500 academic staff with around 600 Professors (if not more) of various disciplines in addition to more than 7,000 non-academic staff. Sometimes, the size makes it difficult to successfully govern ABU and achieve desire goal.

Historically, ABU Zaria is one of the first generation universities in Nigeria. It was established in 1962 by the Government of the then Northern Region of Nigeria to impart knowledge and learning to men and women of all races without distinction on the grounds of race, religious or political beliefs. The founding fathers expected the University to aspire to the highest international ideals of scholarship and to provide learning of a standard required and expected of a university of the highest standing while reflecting the needs, the traditions, and the social and intellectual heritage of the society in which it is located. The University was taken over by the Federal Government of Nigeria in 1975 and has since then assumed a national mandate although its ties with the 19 states created out of the former Northern Region remain very strong.

In the over forty years of its existence, the ABU has grown to become the largest, and the most influential and diverse university in Nigeria. It consists over 100 Academic Departments, twelve Faculties, and twelve Research Institutes and Specialized Centres. The University offers undergraduate and postgraduate courses in diverse fields of Agriculture, Public and Business Administration, Engineering, Environmental Design, Education, Biological and Physical Sciences, Medical and Pharmaceutical Sciences, the Humanities, Law and Social Sciences. The university has two campuses; Samaru and Kongo covering an estimated area of 7,000 hectares of land. Another unique feature of the University, as opposed to other Institutions of its type in Nigeria, is that it has both staff and students from all nooks and cranny of Nigeria, neighboring countries and few other countries across the continents. The university alumni cut across the social classes from former Nigerian President, Vice President, serving and former governors/Deputy governors of virtually all the 36 governors plus Federal Capital Territory, Abuja down to hundreds of local government councils nationwide. Presently, the university has 13 faculties; namely – Administration, Agriculture, Engineering, Medicine, Life Sciences, Arts, Social Sciences, Education, Law, Veterinary Medicine, Environmental Design, and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

What are the impacts of ABU’s accomplishments on the society? This is a difficult question to answer in a society like Nigeria where record keeping and retrieval are herculean task and sometimes impossible to accomplish. This Column focuses on the manpower contribution and technological breakthroughs in the last few decades.  (To be continued next week)    

Recognizing the Second Generation Inventors III

Recognizing the Second Generation Inventors III

Readers may recall that my article of 1^st December 2017 with caption “Recognizing the Second Generation Inventors II” ended with a question “How was the Facebook Invented?” This was after a brief introduction of Mark Zuckerberg as the inventor of “Facebook” when and how it became popular. As a Today, there is no doubt that Facebook became the bedrock of social media, which facilitates the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups. Similarly, Facebook allows the creation and sharing of information, ideas, career interests and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks. Mark Zuckerberg, this globally unanimously accepted inventor of Facebook   made the giant breakthrough at the age of 19 in 2004. He started using Facebook with his college roommate and fellow Harvard University students for communication social interaction among themselves. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was later expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and gradually reached out to most universities in the United States and Canada corporations.

As quickly as wildfire, Facebook became the fasted invention adopted and used by the World Population. According to Wikipedia, the users reached over a billion people by 2012. Facebook started as a computer program called Coursematch where students could list what classes they were taking. It was a tool, which the students were using to share whatever they wanted with other people around them. That was how the first version of Facebook was invented. At the beginning there were many hesitations, "Oh Facebook is just for young people, some people are using it, but it will never make any money." Or, "Oh it works in the USA but it is not going to work around the world." Or, "Oh it works but it is not going to work on mobile, etc.” Facebook marched on to become multi-billion US Dollars invention with over two billion users, second to the Internet with astonishing efficiency in connecting individuals, groups, society and providing opportunity to everyone voice his/her opinion.

Facebook made Zuckerberg to be the youngest celebrant and multi-billionaire within a span of five years. In 2010, Time magazine, an Internationally refutable news magazine named Zuckerberg among the 100 wealthiest and most influential people in the world in the magazine’s special edition of Man of the Year award, 2010. On December 1, 2015, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced their donation of 99 percent of their Facebook shares (worth about US$45 billion at the time) to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The Initiative was a philanthropic Foundation aim to "advance human potential and promote equality in areas such as health, education, scientific research and energy". The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative invested $24 million in Andela for its first major initiative. Andela is a startup focused on training software developers in Africa through their bootcamp and four-year fellowship program, during which they pair their trainees with U.S. companies needing development help. In December 2016, Zuckerberg was ranked the 10^th “The World's Most Powerful People” on Forbes list. In the list, he was ranked as the fifth richest person in the world. Currently, Zuckerberg’s net worth was estimated to be US $74.2 billion as of November this year (2017). Today, Zuckerberg is rated among the most successful personalities but he is not without challenges. Three of Zuckerberg’s former Harvard classmates accused him of stealing their ideas to invent the Facebook. A fourth classmate filed a petition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, where claimed he was the first to create an online Facebook and such should have been awarded with the credit. Well, that is so much about Facebook as a major indicator of the digital age.

The next notable invention of the second generation is “WhatsApp”, who invented it? WhatsApp is another popular social media platform as robust and efficient as Facebook but uniquely different. WhatsApp Messenger is a free software and cross-platform instant messaging and Voice over service. The application allows the sending of text messages and voice calls, as well as video calls, images and other media, documents and user location. The service uses standard cellular mobile numbers and the application runs from a mobile device, but can also be accessible from desktop computers. Brian Acton and Jan Koum invented WhatsApp, which they incorporated in 2009. They were both former employees of Yahoo. After Koum and Acton left the services of Yahoo, they both traveled to South America to “recuperate” or cool-off in a sort of vacation. After the break, they applied for jobs at Facebook but were rejected. Koum was drifting and already eating into his $400,000 in savings from Yahoo. Then in January 2009, he bought an iPhone and realized that the seven-month old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps. Koum had a slight idea of developing communication app similar to Facebook without adverts as he distaste it but was not sure of how. Koum played with different computer programs to develop the App which he named "WhatsApp" to sound like "what's up". After relatively a fair success, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California On February 24, 2009. However, because early versions of WhatsApp often crashed or got stuck at a particular point, Koum felt like giving up and looking for a new job, upon which Acton encouraged him to wait for a "more trials, perfections in few months". The app hadn’t even been written yet. Koum spent days creating the backend code to synch his app with any phone number in the world. At some point it sort of became instant messaging,” as reported by Fishman, a fellow American Russian. “We started using it, as ‘Hey how are you?’ And then someone would reply.” Jan watched the changing statuses on a Mac Mini at his town house in Santa Clara, and realized he’d inadvertently created a messaging service. WhasApp was finally developed and perfected “Being able to reach somebody half way across the world instantly, on a device that is always with you, was powerful,” says exulted Koum after the eventual breakthrough.

It was a perfect App because the only other free texting service around at the time was BlackBerry’s BBM, which worked only among the “BlackBerries”. There was Google’s G-Talk and Skype, but WhatsApp was unique in that the login was user’s personal GSM phone number. Koum released WhatsApp 2.0 with a messaging component and watched his active users suddenly swelled to 250,000. He went to Acton, who was still unemployed and dabbling in another startup idea that wasn’t going anywhere. They both team up and perfected the WhatsApp app itself that offers instant messaging without the fees that carriers often charge and does not show ads. In the few years that followed, WhatsApp expanded to gain up to 450 million users within USA and overseas.

The successful outing of WhatsApp made it irresistible and attractive bride to Facebook who earlier denied the inventors gainful employment. In 2014, Facebook eventually purchased WhatsApp for a princely price of $12 billion in stock and $4 billion in cash. In addition, Facebook set aside another $3 billion in restricted stock units to be granted to WhatsApp’s founders and employees that will invest over the next four years. WhatsApp calls itself "a personal real-time messaging network allowing millions of people around the world to stay connected with their friends and family." During the $19 business transaction between Facebook and WhatsApp, It was apparent that WhatsApp was on a path to connect 1 billion people globally. The Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was quoted thus, "The services that reach that milestone (of connecting 1 billion people) are all incredibly valuable. I've known Jan for a long time and I'm excited to partner with him and his team to make the world more open and connected." The marriage of convenience between Facebook and WhatsApp took the global communication system to the zenith, can there be further improvement? Where are heading to? Time will tell.

Recognizing the Second Generation Inventors II

Recognizing the Second Generation Inventors II

E-mail is the direct fallout to the invention of Internet system. E-mail is one major invention that globally revolutionized communication in the 1980/90s. Email is the direct translation of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system. Today, E-mail is almost replacing the conventional way of letter writing and postage as it is more than 100 times faster, legible, cost - effective and indispensible. I can vividly remember in the late 1990s when many of us queued up at the old Senate building of Ahmadu Bello University Zaria with our floppy diskettes to receive or send E-mail via the then single university E-mail system. At that time, visiting E-mail office was a daily occurrence and part of our daily lives. Still, we were very happy for it as it allowed us send messages across the globe and receive feedbacks at the fastest possible time. Compare that scenario with today’s podcast and different kind of electronic media for written and verbal communication on real-time basis. Who invented E-mail System?

The answer to this question is not as straight as it should be. Invention of E-mail is no doubt a groundbreaking achievement attained by humanity. Controversy, claims and counter claims surround this important human breakthrough, E-mail invention. This is quite understandable for such a zenith level in the global ICT. Going by the record http://www.inventorofemail.com/history_of_email.asp, it was reported that in 1978, a teenager of 14 years of age, named V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai developed a computer program. The program was able to replicate the features of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper mail system. He named his program “EMAIL”. Shiva filed an application to obtain a copyright for the program in 1982. The United States Copyright Office followed due process and issued a Certificate of Registration with a number; TXu-111-775 to Shiva for the program. As required by the Regulations of the Copyright Office, he deposited portions of the original source code with the program. Prominent in the code is the name “EMAIL” that he gave to the program. He received a second Certificate of Registration, No. TXu-108-715, for the “EMAIL User’s Manual” he had prepared to accompany the program. The manual simplified the use of EMAIL that taught unsophisticated users how to use EMAIL’s features. At the time of this invention, however, there were pockets of similar peats in communication system and subsystems among widely dispersed computers. Those system and subsystems were primitive and their usage was largely confined to computer scientists and specialists. It was Shiva’s work that made it possible for the generality of people to use paperless mail in a form of E-mail. When and how did Shiva start it?

It was in the summer of 1978, Shiva was recruited for programming assignments at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) in Newark, New Jersey. One of his supervisors, Dr. Leslie P. Michelson, recognized Shiva’s abilities/potentials and challenged him to translate the conventional paper-based interoffice and inter-organizational communication system (that is, paper-based mail and memoranda) to an electronic communication system. Shiva envisioned something simpler, something that everyone, from secretary to CEO, could use to quickly and reliably send and receive digital messages. Shiva embraced the project and began by performing a thorough evaluation of UMDNJ's paper-based mail system, the same as that used in offices and organizations around the world. He determined that the essential features of these systems included functions corresponding to “Inbox”, “Outbox”, “Drafts”, “Memo” (“To:”, “From:”, “Date:”, “Subject:”, “Body:”, “Cc:”, “Bcc:”), “Attachments”, “Folders”, “Compose”, “Forward”, “Reply”, “Address Book”, “Groups”, “Return Receipt”, “Sorting”. These capabilities were all to be provided in a software program having a sufficiently simple interface that needed no expertise in computer systems to use efficiently to “Send” and “Receive” mail electronically. It is these features that make his program “email” and that distinguish “email” from prior electronic communications. Shiva went on to be recognized by the Westinghouse Science Talent Search Honors Group for his invention. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology highlighted his invention as one among four, in the incoming freshman class of 1,040 students.

Despite this clear and unambiguous record, there was insinuation that Shiva did not deserve the recognition for being the E-mail inventor. Washington post, a refutable USA based paper reported an interview with Mr. Shiva where the paper wrote “Based on false claims, over the past year (since the acceptance of Shiva's documents into the Smithsonian), industry insiders have chosen to launch an irrational denial of the invention. There is no direct dispute of the invention Copyright, but rather inaccurate claims, false statements, and personal attacks waged against Shiva. Attackers are attempting to discredit him, and his life's work. He has received threatening phone calls, unfair online comments, and his name and work has been maligned. It is but a sad commentary that a vocal minority has elected to hijack his accomplishment, apparently not satisfied with the recognition they have already received for their contributions to the field of text messaging. Following the Smithsonian news, they went into action. They began historical revisionism on their own “History of Electronic Mail” to hide the facts”.

In another account documented by Wikipedia; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Tomlinson, stated that Raymond Samuel "Ray" Tomlinson (April 23, 1941 – March 5, 2016) was credited as the first American computer programmer who implemented the first email program on the ARPANET system as the aftermath of the Internet invention in 1971. The record claimed that Ray was/is internationally known and credited as the inventor of E-mail. It was the first system able to send mail between users on different hosts connected to ARPANET. Hitherto, mail could be sent only to others who used the same computer. To achieve this, Ray used the @ sign to separate the user name from the name of their machine, a scheme which has been used in E-mail addresses ever since. The Internet Hall of Fame in its account of his work commented, "Tomlinson's E-mail program brought about a complete revolution, fundamentally changing the way people communicate". The ARPANET claim of E-mail invention was countered by a website; http://www.inventorofemail.com/claims_about_email.asp#False-Claim, which stated, “Email was created at UMDNJ, not on the ARPANET”. It further stated “This quote, “Under ARPANET several major innovations occurred: email (or electronic mail), the ability to send simple messages to another person across the network,” [1] is a misuse of the term “email.” The invention referenced here is command-line protocols for transferring text messages, not email as defined to be a system of interlocking parts, such as the 1978 EMAIL platform, a full-scale emulation of the interoffice inter-organizational paper mail system. As the related references show, early workers in the field of electronic messaging had no intention to create a full-scale electronic version of interoffice or inter-organizational paper mail system and in fact were not even allowed to work on creating an electronic system to replicate “letters”, e.g the interoffice memo”. Well, this is so much ado on E-mail invention; the fact remains that the names of Shiva and Ray may continue to rank high whenever the history of E-mail is being discussed at different forums.

The next invention that uses Internet service for communication between and among people is “Facebook”. Who is the inventor of Facebook? Unlike E-mail, Facebook invention is unanimously credited to another teenager of 19 years old “Mark Zuckerberg” in 2004. Facebook is a social networking service launched on February 4, 2004. The inventor started using Facebook with his college roommate and fellow Harvard University students. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and gradually most universities in the United States and Canada corporations. By September 2006, Facebook was freely available to Internet users with a valid email address along with an age requirement limit of being 13 and older. How was the Facebook Invented? (To be continued next week)

       

Recognizing the Second Generation Inventors

Recognizing the Second Generation Inventors

My 5 – series of article titled “Recognizing the First Generation Inventors” were published ephemerally between Friday 21^st July and Friday, 29^th September 2017. The article was aimed at inspiring new inventors within our society despite our developmental challenges. My readers may recall that the epistle started with utopian scenario; “imagine a land or situation whereby all your wishes are met effortless courtesy of technological facilities, available and accessible to you. Imagine a driverless car, you enter with your wish of travelling to a choice destination in your mind, the car simply drives you and stop at exact point you had in your mind without making any effort. On the other hand, let us imagine another scenario, opposite to first one; the present technological facilities making our lives easier and happier cease to function. No telephone to speak with others few kilometers away from us, no plane to crisscross the continents, no car to travel long distances, no weapon of mass destruction, and many other things making our lives comfortable, enjoyable and sometimes fearful”. The imports of the article were to appreciate the inventors, educate the society and show that inventors succeeded out of personal dedication and utmost commitments to bring out the hidden, God - geven talent to achieve breakthrough. 

The list of first generation inventors and their achievements couldn’t be exhaustive as their works cut across all spheres of human endeavors. However, salient achievements were showcased from communication (paper, writing, etc) to transportation (bicycle to plane), which spanned over six thousand years (4400 BC to the eighteenth century). Those early inventions were modified and made more efficient and cost effective. For instance, the first ever-controlled flight (1700 AD) flew for only 12 seconds over a distance of 37 m. This was then the greatest achievement. It is mind boggling when the snail speed plane of the 1700s is compared to today’s plane which could carry over 500 people with their personal belongings and move with amazing speed of a thousand or so kilometers per hour, faster than speed of sound - a supersonic speed as physicists will call it. In addition to efficiency, there are other totally new inventions, which are very amazing and extremely useful to human race. The inventors of these modern facilities are second-generation inventors.  The most miraculous invention in human history under this category is the “internet”. Who was (were) the inventor(s) of Internet?      

Historically, Internet was not invented by a single individual but was a product of aggregation of efforts made by many people in USA, UK and France over a period of several years. A journal paper entitled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" published in 1948 authored by Claude Shannon (1916–2001) gave impetus to a formal way of studying communication channels as cited by Wikipedia. The article established fundamental limits on the efficiency of communication over noisy channels, and presented the challenge of finding families of codes to achieve a greater capacity. The message conveyed by the article led to the work of Leonard Kleinrock who published his result in a Journal entitled "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets" in 1961. Leonard article provided the necessary clue for the invention of Internet. Before eventual Internet invention. Robert Taylor used the Leonard idea to create a communication network called “ARPANET”. It was an acronym of Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. ARPANET was a Wide Area Network linking many Universities and research centers. It was the beginning of what we consider today as “Internet”. ARPANET was created to make it easier for people to access computers, improve computer equipment, and to have a more effective communication method for the military. ARPANET first came into existence when the first two nodes were established between University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in 1969, which was followed shortly by the University of Utah. The networks based on the ARPANET were government funded and therefore restricted to noncommercial uses such as research.  Unrelated commercial use of the system was strictly forbidden and thus, the larger society was not even aware of the invention. Therefore, ARPANET was restricted connections to military sites and universities. During the 1980s, the connections expanded to more educational institutions, and even to a growing number of companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Hewlett-Packard, which were participating in research projects or providing services or support to such projects. The term "Internet" was first adopted in December 1974 as an abbreviation of the term internetworking and the two terms were used interchangeably. In general, an Internet is any network using Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP). The Internet is a global connection of various networks, which allows communication between any two computers globally.

As interest in networking grew and new applications for it were developed, the Internet's technologies spread throughout the rest of the world. The network-agnostic approach in TCP/IP meant that it was easy to use any existing network infrastructure to carry Internet traffic. On July 3, 1969. University of California, Los Angeles presented a press release with the formal introduction of the Internet to the general public. Twenty years later, in 1989, the first commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP) in the USA was introduced, it was then known as "The World".

In Africa, a privately owned company called InfoMail Uganda, Ltd. first introduced Internet in Kampala, Uganda in 1995. In 1996, a USAID funded project, the Leland Initiative, started work on developing full Internet connectivity for the African continent. Guinea, Mozambique, Madagascar and Rwanda had satellite earth stations in 1997, followed by Ivory Coast and Benin in 1998. The satellite stations facilitated the introduction of Internet in major towns of the African continent.

As the development of Internet continued to flourish, more interests were generated, which brought in many inventors who added value to the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee was among the Internet – Value – Addition inventor. He introduced the popular acronym “www” (World Wide Web) to the public on August 23, 1991. The “www” is a series of sites and pages that are connected with links. The world wide web consists of billions of pages linked to each other that contain text, graphics, multimedia files, and other interactive software that are accessed using a browser.

Other equally important contributions to making the Internet an efficient communication tool are Java and JavaScript. These are computer-programming language. Java was initially called “oak”, It was developed by James Gosling and his team at Sun Microsystems in 1995. Today, Java is still being used to create Internet applications and other software programs. Similarly, Brendan Eich developed JavaScript in 1995. It was initially called LiveScript. It was released with Netscape Navigator 2.0 and renamed to JavaScript with Netscape Navigator 2.0B3. JavaScript is an interpreted client-side scripting language that allows a web designer the ability to insert code into their web page.

Still the question of who made giant contribution to the invention of the Internet needs an answer. The answer to this question was provided by www.computerhope.com “If you had to isolate the key inventors of the Internet, it would have to be two people: Vinton Gray and Robert Kahn”. Vinton Gray nicknamed, as "Vint Cerf” is an American computer scientist, who is referred to as one of "the fathers of the Internet." He was instrumental in the development of the first commercial email system, which was connected to the Internet. He worked with the networking group that connected the first two nodes of the ARPANet, the predecessor to the Internet, and "contributed to a host-to-host protocol" for the ARPANet. He was the founder/co-founder of the Internet Society in 1992. He worked for Google as a Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist since September 2005. Robert (Bob) Elliot Kahn is another American Computer Scientist who is an Internet pioneer, engineer, and computer scientist. Along side Mr. Vinton Gray, they invented the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), which is the fundamental communication protocol at the heart of the Internet. (To be continued next week)