Kanchana Kanchanasut

Kanchana Kanchanasut (Thai: กาญจนา กาญจนาสุต) is a Thai computer science professor at the Asian Institute of Technology who became the first Thai person to use email. She hosted the first server in Thailand connected to the Internet and registered Thailand's country code top-level domain .th in 1988. Kanchanasut was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2013. Quotes I think my role for the Internet was that I was lucky to be part of the people who spread the Internet through Southeast Asia. I brought the Internet to Thailand. That was the reason why I’ve been recognized. That was more than twenty five years ago. So, at that time nobody knew about the Internet or even to use the existing telephone for email. That type of technology was totally new. So introducing technology to a country which was not aware of the possibility was not easy. It was very tough to do. And once the people started to know about this new technology, the existing telecommunication operators were afraid of the impact on their business. So we had to all the time try to live under that condition, which is not easy. So that was the challenging part of our task, to be able to introduce the technology to the public and at the same time we needed to be able to work out with the telecommunication operator that we have to look for the benefit of the whole country instead of you know, looking at their business alone. I always see the Internet as sunny. There’s so many exciting things that happened throughout the past twenty almost thirty years for me. And it’s always sunny. Even though there’s many challenging problems, there’s a lot of issues that you never looked at before, and once you have Internet technology coming in, you start to ask yourself and try to clarify with yourself what kind of the impact of the Internet, which makes you understand your society even better. So I always view this in a positive point of view and I think it’s always sunny. As it is sunny, I don’t fear anything. I like the sun. Because I think you know, whatever technology you bring in, there’s always a negative side of that. And if start fearing that negative aspect which prevents you from doing any other interesting things, I think you are not going the right track. I think the best way is to try to understand a new technology and its impact, and how we can try to accommodate that in our society. And you know, making sure that people would benefit more from the technology than the negative impact. 2013 Internet Hall of Fame Interviews: Kanchana Kanchanasut External Links Category:Living people Category:Computer scientists