A TelecomNet conference on the future of telecommunications is scheduled for June 15, 1994 in Milan. The moderator of the round table, which was attended by all telephone operators, was Beppe Caravita, a historic tech journalist of the time. It had been his idea to invite a strange character, who was said to have helped build much of the nascent Italian internet network. His name was Giuseppe Amedeo Marino, but his parents, from Genoa, had always called him “Gioi” and as soon as he could, he had chosen the name: Joy, like joy. Joy Marino. He was born in Genoa, 32 years before that Milanese round table; and if there were a national team of Italians who “made the net” in Italy, Joy Marino would be one of the eleven. The first connection between a university and the network was created by him, to say: it was immediately after the historic (but at the time nobody made it) connection of Italy to the Internet of April 30, 1986. At the time the spread of the network was above all the work of the Italian Unix Users Association – of which Marino was one of the leaders – which had connected the various Unix machines present in the universities, creating a network that since 1990 became an integral part of our local Internet. It was basically the volunteer work of passionate hackers who believed in the vision of a connected world. But at the beginning of the 90s the world wide web had arrived, the thing was about to climb, and in Europe the first startups were born that proposed to provide the Internet connection (the ISPs, Internet Service Providers). Joy thought it was time to make that thing become her whole life, even leaving the university where she taught electronic engineering. “I was willing to play my ass,” he recalls. He made a coup, he set up the company EuNet Italia trying to shake the associates who in response threw him out. But Joy is a fighter and began touring Italy in search of partners for his business. “I knew the network was about to take off and they burned their hands.” He found them in his Genoa: Alberto Clavarino and Gianni Signa. But to leave you needed a little money, 600 million lire was written in the business plan that Marino had sketched out on four pages of paper. Except that no one yet knew what the Internet Provider was and in the spring of ’94 the company was about to be abandoned when a sort of collection between friends and relatives (family and friends), made it possible to reach the finish line. Among the financiers there was a Ligurian investment company that imposed the headquarters: at the innovation center under the Morandi Bridge.
In June 1994 It.Net was about to be born, “we just had to go to the notary”, when the call came from Beppe Caravita for the round table in Milan. Two days earlier, I.Net was born, the startup of Quintarelli and Galimberti that aimed to do more or less the same things. Joy Marino went to Milan of course, even if she was not yet the CEO of In.Net which was to be formed a few days later. He went and of that round table he remembers that Mario Citelli at one point blurted out: “Let’s stop talking about the Internet, it’s less than 1 percent of 1 percent of the business. It was prophetic in reverse ”. In autumn It.Net made its serious debut at Smau in Milan: “They had put the stand in a very unlucky position but there were so many people who needed the police to contain them”. In the stand there was a large workstation connected via ISDN to Genoa and from there to Cambridge, which worked well because there was still no one on the network.
Joy says that It.Net was a particular company, more like a gangcaleone army of dreamers than a real company. Or as the accountant once said, “We are a cartoon company.” At the end of the 90s, Wind bought it, while Joy Marino managed the MIX, the most important internet node in Milan, until recently. But to give an idea of what a pioneering era it was, it should be remembered that in Christmas 1995, when the Vatican website went online for the first time, behind it there was a startup based in Genoa, in via Greto di Cornigliano. But that’s another story.
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