ThaRum

A decade ago, like any other countries around the world Cambodia began to catch up with Information Technology. The country was left behind the digital era, but it was until 1994 the first electronic communication introduced, years after the Internet came to life. A story of the first Cambodian email user could be found in many news articles in various newspapers. It was back in the early 1990s that a Cambodian government official hoped to continute his higher education in foreign country. The most striking moment was he could not fill in one blank space in the application form: email address. Nobody accessed to the Internet. But, it would be disappointed and dishearten to give up due to that point. As usual, technology invites the world to go on. No e-mail account, no higher education? A group of experts was formed to to setup the first email communication system in this South-east Asian country. It was when the software and necessary tools stored on a floppy disk. Job done. Then the man made it to Europe for his study. The first Internet service provider in Cambodia, Camnet, operated by the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, was established in May 1997. And very soon later, an Australian telecommunications company, Big Pond, also made its presence as competitor. The established office in Phnom Penh with its server in Cambodia connected the main one in Australia. Dial-up Internet connections were made available to some non-government organizations and business enterprises that could afford the monthly fee and per-hour usage charge. It is, at any rate, comparable to how the Internet came to home users in the U.S. about twenty years ago.

The story went on that he could not communicate with his wife. It was language barrier. She could only read and write Khmer. In 2002 Matt McKinney of the Cambodia Daily wrote that

“That’s still the answer, more or less, seven years after e-mail came to Cambodia and five years after the arrival of the Internet. The people who designed the early computers didn’t speak Khmer, so the computers don’t speak it either.
A government minister asked the man who established the first e-mail system in Cambodia if he could send an e-mail in Khmer to his wife, who didn’t speak English.
He was told he couldn’t.
That’s still the answer, more or less, seven years after e-mail came to Cambodia and five years after the arrival of the Internet. The people who designed the early computers didn’t speak Khmer, so the computers don’t speak it either.”

However, after a long-time struggle, Cambodia will soon join the international platform with its own standardized computer script, Khmer Unicode. Khmer Unicode enables computers and computer users worldwide to automatically communicate interchangeably. And until recent years that the country is making progress. KhmerOS project is working to localize Open Source Software into Khmer language, and has recently rolled out a package of software to public domain. The first step, e-mail client and web browser were made available based on its Open Source counterpart, Mozilla Thunderbird and Firefox. And lately, Open Office, strong competitor to the long-time champion Microsoft Office, has also been out in beta version. Meanwhile, OSSK of E-Khmer also plays another major role in the area. WordPress in Khmer is one of completed works. WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform, which recently is made known to public domain for Cambodian users. It is just another milestone. Sooner or later Cambodia will be able to speak language of technology fluently, and then she will sing her own beautiful songs.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 8th, 2006 at 10:16 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.