Geza Turchanyi

He gained his mathematical and computer science knowledge at Fazekas High School. His first professional job was at KFKI (he worked on the world of IBM mainframes in the group of Magdolna Zimányi, on mainframe systems supporting microprocessor programming under the leadership of Lajosné Ivanyos, and on computer networks under Ferenc Telbisz /CÉDRUS, FILTER/).

In 1982, he was admitted to the CERN School of Computing in Switzerland, and then worked for 12 years to establish such a school in Hungary. In the meantime, he also got involved in Commodore 64 game program development. He participated in the development of the first Hungarian national computer network (KSH, 1985) and the Hungarian framework of the ADA programming language; then in the translation of the book “UNIX Programming Environment”.
Between 1989 and 1991, as a fellow at CERN, he developed the RPC/NC (Remote Procedure Call/Network Compiler) part of the control system for the new accelerators based on TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol).

After returning home, he became the co-coordinator of the KFKI Internet Club, a liaison in the NIIF (National Informatics Infrastructure Development) project connected to the European Internet Coordination Forum (RIPE), and a speaker at Networkshop events. In May 1992, he brought home the basic Internet information services software (WWW, Gopher, Whais) from the JENC (Joint European Networking Conference) in Innsbruck, which the members of the Internet Club revived for the domestic environment within a few months. In a presentation prepared together with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the WWW (World Wide Web) at CERN, he presented the world of free (public domain) Internet information services in Debrecen in August 1992 - without even a working Internet connection. In 1994, he worked at the RIPE-NCC (Network Coordination Center) in Amsterdam.

Between 1997 and 2008, he was a prominent Internet designer at Matáv (later Magyar Telekom), and also a participant and sometimes organizer of academic research programs. He was a member of the organizing committee of the Internet Society's 1998 INET conference in Geneva; a speaker in Barcelona in 2004. In 2006, he participated in the Deutsche Telekom innovation competition and was invited to Bonn and Berlin.
In 2009, he wrote the book "Faces Behind the Net", which presents the history, revolution and heroes of the Hungarian Internet in a mosaic-like manner.