The Sardinian entrepreneur and politician, more than twenty years ago, the prophet of the Internet in Prague with his Czech On Line. “I wanted to compete with the new countries of Europe, with what was happening outside the Italian borders and with this new technology… of the network” says Soru today
It was 1995, at 14 Rybná ulice, which back then like now, was the Burzovní palác, the Czech On Line, a Czech company of entirely Italian capital, attempted to succeed where no one in the Czech Republic before had dared – in the Internet.
In the office, an open space in the centre of old Prague, there were particularly young students of economics and computer science working, fifteen Czechs and Italians, all very smart, ambitious and with a passion for the new communication technologies that were just emerging at the time, from several parts of the globe.
Heading the company at the time was Renato Soru, a not even forty-year-old web pioneer and early visionary, who had studied at the Bocconi University in Milan which he had left early to start working.
“Correct and very intelligent, the ability of his staff meant a lot to him, as did their professionalism and performance”, as recalled Yveta Kasalická, who at that time often backed Soru in Prague as an interpreter “he could not stand disorder and paid much attention to the quality and presentability of the office. The face, poker face seen during negotiations with partners and customers, always concrete and founded, conducted without useless chitchat and with the utmost fairness, was sometimes intransigent”.
He was one of the few, who in the years after the Velvet Revolution, managed, partly by taking risks, to make a success of his projects despite the slight contrast with the environment created in the first phase of the newborn capitalism of nineties, when Prague became the reference point of a business environment which was to say the least, wild, a land of conquest for unscrupulous adventurers.
“I wanted to compete with the new countries of Europe, with what was happening outside the Italian borders and with this new technology… of the network”, remembers Soru, who today is a member of the European Parliament.
In those years, Prague and the Czech Republic were not as we know them today. Now the capital can boast thirty or more Internet Service Providers, digital access to the buildings, more online than onsite banks, web domains exposed in shop windows and chrome plates of the historic centre as if they were street numbers. Prague and the network now co-exist in great harmony, but at that time the dark tone of the buildings, affected by the smog of an obsolete energy system for too many years, told the difficulties of everyday life, as well as of progressing in any kind of business, very well. Even just getting the telephone connection for your apartment was tiring, it took months and the only building among the public and private institutions with an Internet connection to which an ordinary citizen could access, was the University.
The Czech On Line launched the offer with eight telephone lines and eight respective modems, at the exceptionally competitive cost of 495 Kc per month. With the connection it provided the browser, the software to surf the Internet, but even then, it gave each company the opportunity to become visible by creating their own website and this provided a few megabytes of space and five mailboxes, without taking care of graphics and design. It was this way that the Prague Stock Exchange began publishing information on financial markets in real time on the web, users of Czech On Line soon became a few thousand and the company which stood third in the following years in the Czech Republic for the number of users. The connection speed of course was very slow, the fastest was at 64k per second, the ADSL was a chimera that came only in 2000.
In Italy the e-mail inboxes were few and had to be paid, there was still no concept of an Internet portal, but perhaps not even of an Internet Service Provider or the Telephone Company and the connections were so slow that one desired to return to childhood again, and reattach the tape on cassette players, and load video games on the Commodore 64, since the wait was so long to see something appear on the screen. The rooms of the youngest were full of floppy disks containing video games, but the transition from analogue to digital had not happened yet, and nobody certainly wasted time on the Internet.
However let’s leap into the past. Tim Berners Lee coined the name World Wide Web only in 1990, the period in which he also wrote the first draft of HTML, the leading language of the network, which has diffused since 1994. Through the CERN in Geneva, Carlo Rubbia, Nobel Prize winner for physics, a few months later, brought this technology to CRS4, the research centre of Sardinia, which launched the first website in Italy, on the address www.crs4.it which is still in use. And so began the era of the great technological achievements in Sardinia. Mosaic became the first Internet browser, Luca Manunza created the first Webmail, L’Unione Sarda (The Sardinian Union), under the leadership of Nicola Grauso, the first online newspaper in Europe, and it was with Grauso that Video online was born, the first Internet Service Provider in Italy and its Czech counterpart, Czech on Line, the first provider in the Czech Republic, the first commercial Internet connection.
Of course, Renato Soru had not come to Prague with the intention of developing in that company, but he fell in love with it quickly. In fact, like many Italians the curiosity that had initially brought him here in 1994, was indeed in the city and its buildings, the real estate, after all who would not be fascinated by it?. Even before the young Soru had not ventured in IT, but instead preferred to deal with large-scale distribution, still a student, going from the management of a grocery store, to a career in banking in London and Milan, eventually creating a small chain of supermarkets which he then sold. Yet, when seen from Prague’s perspective the Internet mirage appeared to be a more solid idea, which he could share with other Sardinians, who like him, had also needed to be thought to be connected with other nations beyond the sea, through an invisible network that would allow him to live and work in Sardinia interfacing with the rest of the world, without loss of relationships and quality in communication.
The eight lines of Czech On Line multiplied very fast, in some periods they even reached eight thousand. Video On Line, the parent company, decided to open the web to all, and offered free access to the Internet, and with it the first free inboxes, keystone and core engine at the dawn of the new economy. It was therefore in this way that the Czech company only three years later was sold to a US and German private equity fund and then to an Austrian company that still owns the property, while Video On Line, acquired by Telecom Italy, became Tin.it. With the gain of the sale, however, Renato Soru decided to return to Sardinia and founded Tiscali, which would make him famous as the richest man in Italy.
The links and connections, both spatial and symbolic, between the Czech Republic and Italy, Prague and Cagliari, from 1994 to today, have been so many in the field of information technology, and it is curious to think that a series of occasions, inventions, events and energies, educated and directed, in a project modified many times over time have created such beautiful human and technological revolutions that have so strongly affected our way of relating to information and communication.
by Mario Carta