Subject: [NEXTEL-1] At 74, Internet pioneer tirelessly spreads wireless

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2003 21:02:29 -0500

At 74, Internet pioneer  tirelessly spreads wireless 

By BRIAN BERGSTEIN
The Associated Press
1/19/03

Colorado Springs, Colo. (AP)

Dave Hughes certainly doesn't look the part of a technology trailblazer. The burly,
74-year-old retired Army colonel could stuff a scrawny computer geek in his Stetson. 

But Hughes has made a second career out of extending Internet-era benefits to overlooked
people and places. And the man known as "The Cursor Cowboy" isn't about to ride off into
the sunset just yet. 

After a decorated military career that included combat in Korea and Vietnam, Hughes began
exploring the Internet in the 1970s, when it was known to little more than a gaggle of
scientists. Logging in from a neighborhood bar, Hughes spun countless tales about the Old
West, becoming one of the first online celebrities. 

In the 1980s, when many were using personal computers for such basics as word processing,
Hughes showed neighbors in Colorado Springs and teachers in one-room Western schoolhouses
the power of electronic bulletin boards. 

A decade later, he was merrily ignoring the conventional wisdom that high-speed Internet
access for out-of-the-way places was cost-prohibitive and technologically arduous. 

Armed largely with grants from the National Science Foundation, Hughes set up wireless
connections in small towns, an Indian reservation; the Wisconsin woods, the Mongolian
steppes and Puerto Rican jungles. His pioneering in "packet radio" put Hughes far ahead of
the current explosion in the wireless Internet. 

"Col. Dave Hughes, USA, Ret., is the only character who has popped up in the plot every
time I've investigated the roots of a technology revolution," futurist author Howard
Rheingold wrote in "Smart Mobs," his 2002 book about the sociology of constant Internet
connectivity. 

Hughes' ideas about wireless are now mainstream. 

Witness the boom in the networking standard called WiFi, the government's overhaul of
airwave regulation and the growing number of "fixed wireless" services that beam data at
broadband speeds directly to subscribers. 

"This is the beginning of a global revolution in communications, and I'm tickled pink!"
Hughes bellows in an interview. 

With a long white goatee and stout body, Hughes resembles Orson Welles in his later days,
though his wardrobe is gentleman rancher: cardigans, collared shirts, turquoise-studded
bolo tie, black cowboy boots. He never goes anywhere without wedging a Stetson on his
head. 

These days, Hughes is helping Sherpas in Nepal set up wireless Internet connections,
including one for a cybercafe at the Mount Everest base camp. Soon climbers will check
e-mail at 18,000 feet before trying to reach the top of the world. 

He's trying to crack another puzzle for the National Science Foundation: how scientists
can wirelessly get real-time data from the bodies of hibernating Arctic ground squirrels,
whose temperatures miraculously drop below freezing. 

He's also forcefully arguing for changes in federal regulations so wireless technologies
can flourish in rural areas. 

And all the while, he and his daughter, Rebecca Clark, are running a small Internet
service provider in Colorado Springs. 

"All I want to do is connect up all 6 billion brains on the planet," Hughes explains in
the compact office in his modest home here, as classical music plays in the next room. 

Hughes' wife, Patsy, brings him a cup of coffee, but he talks so much he never touches it. 

"Don't Americans always say if we can improve communications among peoples, we can clear
up misunderstandings? Why don't we do a 100 percent test of that thesis?" 

Hughes has always stood out. He sometimes taught English classes at West Point with a
parakeet perched on his shoulder, to show that a combat hero could have a soft side. 

While chief of staff at Fort Carson in Colorado in the late 1960s, Hughes felt the Army's
strict rules failed to inspire restless young men in the turbulent era. 

So he let troops paint tanks in psychedelic colors, drive them in road rallies and bring
wives and girlfriends along as navigators. He stocked base hangouts with beer and go-go
girls, encouraged black troops to stage Guerrilla Theater and brought in such diverse
political speakers as Cesar Chavez and William F. Buckley. 

After retiring from the military in 1973, Hughes launched Enjoy Colorado, a service that
sold customized information about the state. It didn't work out, but Hughes realized that
such a project needed the organizing power of a computer. 

To learn, he got a Radio Shack PC. It was 1977. With a 300-baud modem (roughly 1,900 times
slower than most dial-ups today) Hughes began exploring early online bulletin boards. 

Soon after, Hughes fought city officials' plans to raze parts of Old Colorado City, the
historic commercial stretch in his neighborhood. He led a revitalization centered around
attracting small local businesses, no big chains. 

He had no idea what he was doing, so he asked for advice from people on the Source, an
online bulletin board. No one answered. 

So Hughes decided to attract a crowd. He filled the Source with old yarns about the West,
earning him the Cursor Cowboy nickname, and again asked for help with the historic
district. 

Sure enough, a few strangers out there told him how tax laws, government grants and other
urban planning maneuvers had saved old parts of Chicago and San Diego. 

The old warrior's online life took off. 

"Someone once said to me, `cultivate your own garden,"' Hughes says. "I said, I'm going to
use a microprocessor as a hoe and a modem as a wheelbarrow." 

In the early 1980s, he taught an online college course. He set up bulletin boards aimed at
encouraging civic participation in Colorado Springs and information sharing among rural
teachers. 

In 1983, Hughes spread the word online that a pending zoning rule in Colorado Springs
would prevent some people from working at home in new jobs made possible by
Internet-connected computers. After 175 people showed up at a previously obscure city
meeting to protest, the rule was changed. 

"What he loves is when somebody tells him something can't be done. He up and does it
himself," says Frank Odasz, who worked on the schoolhouse bulletin board project and now
mentors rural towns on how to use the Internet for community development. 

Don Mitchell, who managed Hughes' National Science Foundation research, points out that
every time Hughes goes someplace to experiment with wireless connectivity, he trains the
locals how to use it too. 

"He's a Johnny Appleseed of telecommunications," Mitchell says. 

Take Hughes' endeavor to spread wireless broadband through rural Wales, his ancestral
homeland. Hughes went there last year at the request of community groups that believe
extending broadband beyond the region's cities will stimulate the economy and preserve
Welsh culture. 

In classic Hughes form, he tweaked British Telecom by claiming the dominant carrier had
plenty of fiber-optic cable lying dormant in Wales. He also offered solutions: combining
WiFi radios, satellite service and existing university networks to spread Internet access
throughout Wales. 

He unfurled his ideas in 18 speeches one week, and stunned local technicians by working
past 4 a.m. with his son David Jr., said Elen Rhys, director of an involved Welsh
educational group. 

Hughes also insisted that Welsh groups design community-specific Web portals that could
offer alternatives to Yahoo and AOL -- and draw traffic from Welsh descendants elsewhere. 

"There's a lot happening here that would not have happened if not for Dave coming over,"
Rhys says. "He's a military man who says, `I know where my hill is, and I'm going to take
it,' and he didn't really care who got in the way." 

That gusto sometimes misses its mark. 

In the mid-1990s, Hughes tested wireless access in Colorado's largely poor and remote San
Luis Valley. The technology worked, but only a few schools and nonprofits took up Hughes'
ideas for a community bulletin board, said Noel Dunne, who directed a social services
group and worked with Hughes. 

Dunne believes many people in the traditionally insular valley were suspicious of the
outsider -- and often didn't understand the technologies he touted. 

"They missed an opportunity by not embracing him, his knowledge and his eccentricity,"
Dunne said. 

Hughes' technology passion has limits. He realizes that many previously unconnected people
use the Internet for pornography and other trifles, ignoring civic endeavors. And he
predicts many people in the ever-more-connected future will suffer from information
overload. 

But he's not counting on being one of them. 

When he dies, Hughes wants his coffin equipped with a laptop computer, wireless Internet
access and a solar panel that would grab light from above ground. 

Software in the laptop would study his past writings and incorporate new information into
what the living Hughes knew and thought -- and then take over the task of being him. 

Even after he's gone, computer screens in far-off places would blink a message from his
silicon continuation: "Hi, this is Dave Hughes. Wanna chat?" 

All he asks is that someone clear fallen leaves off the coffin's solar panel from time to
time. 

"You'll be dealing with me 'til the end of time," he says, "or until the sun blinks out." 

Hughes' NSF work: http://www.wireless.oldcolo.com

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