The physicists who convinced Fermilab to send Brazil's emails | Hacker News Reader

The physicists who convinced Fermilab to send Brazil's emails

buttondown.com

58 pointsmaguay17 comments

In 1998-1999, I was the organizer for a Bioinformatics course in Sao Paulo Brazil, funded in some indirect way by the National Academy of Sciences (as I recall). In addition to paying for the faculty (about 6 people) to spend a week teaching, the budget also paid to purchase an SGI server, which was a standard machine to run the bioinformatics software. The course ran for a week in January, 1999, and we had ordered (and paid for) the machine by July, 1998.

A group of us arrived in Sao Paulo on Thursday (before the course was scheduled to start on Monday) to begin configuring the machine -- downloading/transferring software and databases. We did not trust the internet, so we brought the stuff we needed on a laptop.

We got there thursday, to find out that despite a 6 month lead-time, the machine had not been delivered. Not only that, the weekend we planned to configure the machine, the power to the campus was scheduled to be shut off so that some of the 60+ year old infrastructure could be replaced (our host got a special dispensation to keep the power on in the building we were using). After many frantic calls, the machine was delivered around 5:00 pm on Friday. We worked frantically through the weekend, and managed to get a few things working, a few hours before our first computer lab. Fun times.

Its actually inherited from portugese and spanish culture, where protestant puntuality is sort of viewd as a "slave" or servant mentality (which in protestant culture where "you" are equal with all before god is just not a thing). A nobleman is the lord of his own time and sets his own appointment, can be found in all spanish colonies and in the morher countries.

Too bad California fell on the wrong side of this divide.

Why, no california is a two layer culture now, the labourers catholic , the upper crust protestant ?

How does this work in the Brazilian military?

I can’t imagine they show up whenever they wish.

No. Work in general requires punctuality unless you’re boss, of course.

Huh. So ironically the cultural norm ends up reinforcing, on a daily basis, that most people are unimportant and dismissable compared to those worthy for showing up on time.

> protestant culture where "you" are equal with all

Can you explain this concept?

If I was in Brazil and invited to a bbq at 8pm, how would the host respond if I asked “so what time do you actually want me to arrive”?

You can go on time if you want to help out preparing the party. If you ask what time the party really starts, they will probably tell you 30 minutes to an hour after the official time, which is how long they expect to spend getting things ready. Some people come 2 hours late because they want to arrive when the party is already “hot”. The early hours tend to be “boring” as everyone is just arriving slowly, helping put food on the table and cooling the drinks, no one is drunk yet and so on. After 2 hours it’s the fun part. Hope that helps should you find yourself being invited by Brazilians , in Brazil or elsewhere.

This sounds like US college / night life / young adult house party scene, too, fwiw.

> The Brazilian government wanted to control the flow of information across borders, while academia championed unfettered access to international research, both of which were hampered by local telecoms that coveted monetization.

For context, by 1975 Brazil was still aproximately halfway under the brutal military dictatorship that started in 1964, through a military coup supported by Operation Brother Sam[1], and ended only in the late 80s. The movie "The Secret Agent", Oscar nominated in the 2026 ceremony, unfolds in 1977, roughly the same timeframe. It would be a very interesting topic for historical research to comb national files from that period to see if the military surveiled or acted against the named researchers, in some form, for those first attempts to conect to the proto-internet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Brother_Sam

Gosh, what a badly written article, despite the theme being interesting

"In the end, all it took to break the impasse was a few copper wires, laid across the Gulf of Mexico to a high-energy physics lab just outside of Chicago, in 1991."

Make it make sense. Either in how Chicago is close to the Gulf, Brazil is on the Gulf, or in 1991 having a working wire thousands of miles long qualifies as a throwaway "all it took."

Deliberate understatement is sometimes deployed for humorous intent.

Which sometimes works.

But maybe not in the case of "all it took to get the internet connected was connecting the internet."

Also worth noting that Brazil was under a dictatorship at the time

ha FidoNet, wow that takes me back, world has changed SO much

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