Meet The Father of Africa’s Internet, Prof. Nii Quaynor, and the other three guys who brought the Internet to Ghana 29 years ago.

Even with the occasional data outage, we all appreciate Ghana’s internet access today, but regrettably, we don’t know much about the four guys who introduced the internet to the country 29 years ago or the sacrifices they made to get us this far.

If not for the aspirations, sacrifices, and hard work, Ghana would not have been among the African nations with complete internet connectivity in August 1995.

While August 1995 is officially recognized as the month and year when Ghana began to have full internet access, the groundwork for this was established in 1993 through laborious work.

Introducing The Father of the African Internet, Prof. Nii Quaynor

Prof. Nii Quaynor and his capable technical team—which included Andy Bulley, Joseph Annan, William Tevie, and others—founded the Network Computer Systems (NCS) in Ghana in 1993, and that is how the internet as we know it today came to be.

The four bright, forward-thinking men who introduced the internet to Ghana 29 years ago are named by Knowbody today.

Although Nii Quaynor is credited with spearheading Ghana’s internet services, he collaborated with other tech-savvy individuals to provide us with this vital resource, which you are currently utilizing to read this article.

I also won’t be able to share this with you in this way without the internet. Ghana Dot Com’s board chairman is Professor Nii Quaynor.

Prof. Nii Quaynor had a unique and strong zeal for applying technology to solve problems in 1993.

Because of his significant contribution to the growth of the Internet in Africa, he is now known as the “Father of the African Internet.”

He graduated from Dartmouth College with a B.A. in engineering science in 1972. He continued his studies at S.U.N.Y. at Stony Brook, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in computer science in distributed systems in 1977.

In the United States, he worked extensively from 1977 to 1992. Ghana’s road towards internet connectivity began in 1993 when he founded Network Computer Systems, the country’s first ISP, after returning to Ghana in 1992.

However, it was thanks to his efforts that the University of Cape Coast’s Computer Science Department was established in 1977.

In December 2007, he received the renowned Jonathan Postel Service Award from the Internet Society for his efforts that pioneered and promoted the Internet in Africa, adding to his already impressive acclaim. Because of his innovative contribution to the growth of the Internet in Africa, he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2013.

How Prof. Nii Quaynor brought the Internet to Ghana

In 1993, he pushed for Ghana to register its first domain name. GH.COM was the domain name. It was registered in 1993 by Network Computer Systems (NCS), a business. All that a domain is is the easily recognizable name for a website. The website that you are currently viewing is called Ghana Education.

They searched for ways to go online and serve the internet after securing the domain. Pipex’s assistance allowed the NCS to launch a for-profit service in Ghana. A DEC station 5000 type 25 equipped with Morningstar PPP software was used to do the dial-up IP to Pipex technique of connecting to the internet regularly.

Over time, Ghana’s internet services had to be expanded, but there were several obstacles to overcome, the main one being the absence of sufficient or appropriate DELs. As a result, people who subscribe to the NCS’s dial-in lines are unable to receive internal services from the organization.

Thanks to Ghana Telecom’s efforts, telephone services had started to grow by October 1994. Ghana Telecom’s action resulted in the addition of 15,000 lines to exchanges in Accra.

When NCS’s application for a top-level domain was granted in January 1995, more and more Ghanaians in Accra and Kumasi sought to use the internet, which put additional pressure on the government.

It was necessary to purchase two workstations from a Telebit Netblazer equipped with a rack of American robotics modems to guarantee the availability of internet services.

Each of the two discs had a memory capacity of 48 megabytes, for a total capacity of just 6 GB. Is that even possible to imagine? Although this was far from one gigabyte for the entire country and less than 5 megabytes, it gave NCS the appearance of a developing Internet service provider in January when it enhanced internet access throughout Ghana.

In August, Ghana was prepared to be acknowledged as the newest Internet hub in Africa, offering complete Internet access via a leased connection throughout the sub-Saharan region. The laudable efforts of Nii Quaynor and his formidable technical team—which includes William Tevie, Joseph Annan, Andy Bulley, and other NCS members—are responsible for Ghana’s internet connectivity success. An information technology business in Ghana called NCS offers a range of services.

Professor Nii Quaynor is the founding chairman of AFRINIC, the African numbers registry, and convener of AfNOG, an organization dedicated to network technology transfer founded in 2000.

Unquestionably, Professor Nii Quaynor is a magnificent guy, and we should constantly give thanks to God for his life, vision, and foresight, which allowed us to have the internet in the first place. In the same way that the Chinese and Japanese enhanced their automobile brands over time, so too did he and his colleagues progressively lay the fundamental foundations for the incredible internet services that Ghanaians have access to today.