About the Results Service from The Winter Olympics at Lillehammer 1994

Believe it or not, but the technical side of this project started February 10, only two days before the first event.

However, Oslonett had thought about doing this for months, but we thought it would be impossible to approach LOOC (Lillehammer Olympic Organizing Committee) and make them convinced that this was a smart thing to do. Those guys don't know anything about Internet or World Wide Web, nor do they want to.

So we just dropped the whole idea until we were contacted by Skrivervik Data, the Norwegian Sun dealer and one of our pilot customers on «The Oslonett Marketplace». John Gage at Sun Microsystems had sent a mail to Skrivervik Data where he suggested that Skrivervik should contact Oslonett to try to make Olympic Results available through World Wide Web - he knew Oslonett from the Web where we are quite visible.

Sun is a technologically oriented company and wants to support innovative efforts like this. In addition, there is a big advertising potential involved. Of course, this is also one of the driving forces for Oslonett, since we try to make money out of advertising on the Internet.

So we thought this over again and contacted NTB - Norsk Telegrambyrå - the main Norwegian news wire service. We know NTB quite well from an interesting electronic News service at the University of Oslo. Here, regular wire news are received through a modem and fed automatically into local regular USENET newsgroups. This is a service similar to Clarinet.

A deal with NTB was settled, and we started immediately to work out the technical solution. When raw NTB news are received through the above mentioned modem connection, these bulks of data are pumped along to Oslonett as News articles using standard TCP/IP mechanisms.

At the receiving end (Oslonett), Perl scripts translate the News articles into HTML files and build up links and indexes. All this is done on a SPARCstation 10, kindly provided by Sun Microsystems and Skrivervik Data.

This service has become extremely popular, and it was necessary to set up an overseas mirror site.

At the time of this writing, the mirror service is up and running at Sun Microsystems.

Updated, February 23, 1994, Steinar Kjærnsrød