Forty Years Ago Italy Joined the Internet with a Ping from Pisa: The Story of CNUCE
Forty years ago, at around 18:00 on April 30, 1986, a single command was sent from the machine room of CNUCE-CNR in Pisa: ping. On the other side of the Atlantic, in Roaring Creek, Pennsylvania, the response came back: OK. In that instant, Italy entered the Internet, becoming the fourth European country to do so after Norway, the United Kingdom, and Germany.
How It Worked Technically
The signal did not travel directly through a transatlantic cable. From the National University Center for Electronic Computing (CNUCE), one of the first Italian scientific institutions in the field of computer science, located on Via Santa Maria just a few meters from the Leaning Tower, it traversed a land line to the Fucino Plain in Abruzzo, where a 30-meter parabolic antenna from Telespazio sent it to the Intelsat IV satellite and from there to Roaring Creek. All of this happened at 64 Kbps, a speed that was more than sufficient for the research purposes of the project at that time. At the center of the infrastructure was the Butterfly Gateway, an experimental router made up of 256 processors connected in a butterfly configuration (hence the name), provided and funded directly by the U.S. Department of Defense.
The protocol used was TCP/IP, the same standard that today supports the entire global network. The command was pressed by Antonio Blasco Bonito, a researcher at CNUCE; meanwhile, the entire project was conceived and directed in the preceding years by Luciano Lenzini, who had started working on it back in 1970 and had convinced the leaders of CNR after a stay at IBM's scientific center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he had seen Arpanet’s potential firsthand. Also present was Stefano Trumpy, director of CNUCE, who today is the Honorary President of the Italian Internet Society.
The Bureaucracy That Almost Blocked Everything
The path to the first Italian node was not straightforward. Lenzini had contacted Robert Kahn (co-inventor of TCP/IP along with Vint Cerf) back in 1980, but it took six years to navigate the bureaucratic delays related to agreements with SIP, Telespazio, and Italcable. The final blow seemed to arrive when DARPA required all European nodes to use the new Butterfly Gateway, the cost of which was prohibitive for CNUCE's budget. Lenzini was ready to withdraw; he conveyed this in person in Washington during an ICB (International Cooperation Board) meeting. It was Kahn himself, after a brief consultation with the board members, who saved the project: "Luciano, the Butterfly will be funded by the U.S. Department of Defense." The device arrived in Pisa, cleared after several more months of customs negotiations, replacing the old operational gateway that CNUCE had been working with up to that point.
Despite the significance of the event, the Italian press did not report the news, also due to the Chernobyl disaster that occurred just days earlier and dominated the headlines. The silence lasted thirty years, until the celebrations of 2016 in Pisa. That connection at 64 Kbps was the prelude to a transformation that would rewrite the economy, communication, and global culture.
A year after the first ping, the .it Registry was born at CNR in Pisa: the registry for domains with Italian extensions, still managed today by CNR-IIT (Institute of Informatics and Telematics). It is also in Pisa that the machine from which that first signal was sent is preserved: a Mac from 1984, displayed at the Museum of Calculation Instruments at the University of Pisa. A plaque on Via Santa Maria officially commemorates the event.
Celebrating 40 Years Today
Today CNR-IIT celebrated the fortieth anniversary with an event at the CNR Research Area Auditorium on Via Moruzzi in Pisa. At the center of the program were the future trajectories of the network: artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and digital sovereignty. Among the speakers were Franco Bernabè, Massimo Inguscio, Tommaso Melodia, and Roberto Baldoni. The theme was not so much the past as what comes next: a more distributed, smarter Internet, potentially redesigned by quantum computing.
The MuPIn (Piedmontese Museum of Informatics) is also participating in the celebrations with the exhibition "Journey Through the History of the Internet", donated by GARR, which retraces the key milestones of the global network from its origins to today. A path that inevitably begins with that ping on April 30, 1986.