[Following articles appeared in MSNBC on August 26, 1997 covering the recent trip made by Dan Haig and the company to Dharamsala to set up the Gangkyi (LAN) local area network. TS]

Soledad: Do they have computers?

Dan Haig: There are many computers actually, but mostly they were all stand alone, just work stations. They did have an email connection that required a long distance dial up to Delhi, and in order for people to get to this one computer that was sending email, they had to put their message onto a floppy disk, walk it down the mountain several kilometers and take it to this office. That's not very effective or efficient.

Soledad: So it's very, very difficult. What's "sneaker net" they were using "sneaker net," what's that?

Richard Schneider: Sneaker net is putting some information on a floppy and walking it with your sneakers to another computer. There are people in the government compound; there are multiple buildings we had to connect together. They would walk from their building down a set of steps across the compound and up ninety steps to the third floor of this building where the computer resource center is. So when people went up to get their mail, they were always panting, and it was kind of amusing to see that.

Soledad: What were you able to do as the tech jockey?

Schneider: As the wire jockey.

Soledad: The wire jockey.

Schneider: We put in a 10Base2 ThinNet network which was coaxial.

Soledad: And in English that means?

Schneider: It's a coaxial network that basically runs Ethernet throughout the compound, so we had one big computer network, and it's a very low tech network. There're no repeaters or anything. It's just a star getting techno here. There's a star [network] that actually axed where all the buildings will come down to this one central location and serve information anywhere. There's no intelligent switching at all, so the entire network will see any message sent from here to here.

And so basically, there's a printer here, there's a computer here, they can print here, they can send mail here, they can serve from the server. They can do anything they want. There were quite a few buildings, and we had to run aerial cable, wire cable and anchor it into concrete, use turn buckles to tighten it all up and run cables. It was quite a trick considering that they had very few tools, and not many ladders, and we were hanging off of roofs and things like that.

Soledad: Were you wiring the Dalai Lama to communicate with his followers?

Haig: Well, the private office of His Holiness is up the mountainside, and we were able to establish not only the local network in the government compound but up the mountain. In other areas of the computer compound, we established a dialog service, so they could call in like most people do with their modems.