Father of Pakistani Blogosphere
Posted by Sabahat (iFaqeer) on September 4, 2007
In the very first post on this blog, when I was providing an introduction to prominent NEDians in the blogsosphere, I introduced “Tee Emm” (Tariq Mustafa, Batch ‘90-91) as “probably one of the first people to write a blog out of Pakistan”. But it appears that my cautious characterization was unnecessary.
The Karachi Metroblog team (Metroblogging ®, for the uninitiated, is the largest and fastest growing network of city-specific blogs on the Web–from San Francisco to Bangkok, from Karachi to Toronto, Metblogs are a hyper-local look at what’s going on in the city) recently held a seminar at “The Second Floor” (a coffeehouse, featuring a bookshop and a space for creative expression and intelligent discourse in Karachi) titled “Blogging 101″. You can read their own report here, but what caught my eye was the following slide:
Which means that I stand corrected. It is good to see general recognition for the work of an NEDian who’s been hacking away in the netroots for a long, long time.
Tariq, for whose who don’t know, is a networking professional based in Karachi. Some readers will be familiar with him from his columns and other writing under the “Tee Emm” byline in Dawn, Spider and other magazines and newpapers in Pakistan.
And Tariq is the kind of favorite son an alma mater can not only be proud off, but also rely on. For it was he that started and ran one of the largest and longest-running mailing lists for NEDians–”ECN”, the “Electronically Connected NEDians” list was started back in 1996 or so, and still exists, though it has been superseded by all the others now out there and now lies in suspended animation. He was also the owner of NEDians.org.pk, which has not been replaced by NEDians.org.
As we said in the initial post, you can read his work on Metroblog Karachi, and his thoughts on what he calls “Nex Gen Issues” here.
At the peril of being called a show-off, I would like to mention that back in 1997 (our graduation year), we had managed to pull together a full-fledged email network at the campus’s Computer lab as our final year project. This was based on a UUCP network with SDNPK (another great NEDian story) and allowed real (back then) US-school-style unlimited accounts creation. The network used to dial (via a voice modem) out 8 to 10 times a day to send and receive real Internet emails for the students and teachers account configured on the network accessed by a couple of dozen real hard Unix terminals.
Not only it provided real email facility to a significant users (and kept on working for a number of years afterwards), the facility enhanced the spice of the unix environment where enthusiasts and unix-curious students would enjoy ‘wall’ing and ‘talk’king and playing with the shell scripting.
Of course, the current situation at the campus is far better with lots of Internet bandwidth and optical fiber running across the campus wide switched network. An update on this from a current student or a recent graudate seems to be in order.
Great post on Tariq Bhai,
I do recall that in 1998 , I was among the ECN users of the emails. I do recall seeing Tariq at their locations. It is probably the first thing I used when I bought my first Fax modem card.I do recall the Blue screen of ECN and was really excited to sending my first email. Sometimes I would check it after every hour or so to see if there are new emails.
Sabahat was another person whose emails were a regular feature.
During those days there was nice and fancy BBS (Bulletin Board System) where you would dial in and get some news and updates on a lot of stuff.
In 1998, then came the IBM with a bang which you could get 4 accounts with Rs.1500 per month with unlimited usage. That really helped the the students in general to experience the internet.
Personally I think his greatness not only lies in this achievements he made for the benefit of the NEDIANs but also his humbleness.
I remember the SDNPK days very fondly
I think TeeEmm and Khurram Khani worked with Zia-ur-Rahman of the Electrical Engineering Computer Lab back in 1997. I was in 2nd year at that time and I think I remember seeing them wire up the lab using coax cables.
The Unix lab was fun! I wrote my first trojan there (oh happy days!
) and I can’t tell you how many unsuccessful attempts I made to crack the passwords file back then, someone in the senior batch (1993-94) actually cracked it and posted listings of usernames along with passwords in class.