On December 2, 1988, the Computer Institute at Uruguay’s University of the Republic established the first stable email connection between Latin America and the rest of the world. It wasn’t the internet as we know it today — but it was the first thread. Behind that moment was Ida Holz, an engineer who would become the person who connected an entire region to the digital world.
A Life That Didn’t Follow a Straight Line
Holz was born in 1935 into a Jewish family of Polish origin. Her father died when she was three; her mother worked to keep the family together, and Ida started working at fourteen. At eighteen, she moved to Israel, lived on an agricultural commune, and did military service. Back home, she tried to study architecture but the schedules didn’t fit her work hours — so she shifted to mathematics education instead.
Building a Network From Scratch
A professor pointed her toward computing when IBM was offering basic courses at the university. In the early 1970s, she was part of the first generation of computer engineers in her country, one of only four women in the program. In 1973, with a military dictatorship taking hold, she went into exile in Mexico, where she worked at the National Statistics Institute and built deep expertise in information networks. The Mexican government offered her the directorship of the institute. She had already decided to go home.
In 1987, with democracy restored, Holz won the position of director of the Central Computer Service (SECIU) at the University of the Republic. Working with limited resources in a country she herself described as deeply conservative — where “every change costs an enormous amount” — she began building the region’s first academic digital infrastructure.
The first step was extending the email system at the Engineering faculty to the rest of the university. In the beginning, the connection meant calling Buenos Aires by phone twice a day to exchange messages stored on a server. From that starting point, her team built the Academic Network, registered the .uy domain in 1990, and in 1994 installed the first internet node in the country — a moment the Internet Hall of Fame marks as the foundation of everything that followed.
The Night in Rio That Reshaped the Internet in Latin America
In 1991, at a congress in Rio de Janeiro, the United States and Europe proposed managing the nascent Latin American network from outside the region. Holz objected. She and a group of Latin American pioneers spent an entire night drafting the foundations of what would become the Latin American Academic Network Forum — the seed of RedCLARA, LACNIC, and the organizations that gave internet governance in the region its own shape and voice, built by the people who actually understood the context.
Recognition From the North
In 2013, the Internet Society inducted her into the Internet Hall of Fame — the first Latin American, man or woman, to receive the honor. When Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet, was asked whether there was a “mother of the internet,” his answer was immediate: “Yes. Her name is Ida Holz.” She received it with characteristic modesty: “They had to honor someone from the region and I was the oldest one.”
As GÉANT Connect documents, colleagues across the region describe her leadership as the connective tissue that made Latin American internet cooperation possible. Her story is also a direct answer to why the gender gap in tech carries a real cost: what gets built looks different depending on who is in the room — and Holz was in the room when it mattered most.
What She Said About Mistakes
“You have to keep walking, keep moving forward, and not be afraid of mistakes — because you learn a great deal from mistakes.” She said it with decades of work behind her. Not as self-help advice, but as a description of how digital infrastructure gets built: decision by decision, with whatever is available.
This is the sixth installment of the Women Who Built Technology series. You can also read the entries on Radia Perlman, Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Margaret Hamilton, and Hedy Lamarr.
