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.
AHEAD OF HIS TIME 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 that will let climbers 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?”
PSYCHADELIC TANKS TO BULLETIN BOARDS 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.
‘JOHNNY APPLESEED’ OF TELECOM 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.
UNDETERRED BY DEATH 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.
Special 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.”
© 2003 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.