The event commemorates the first ISABEL distributed event, namely ABC94, the second Summer School on Advanced Broadband Communication organised in July 1994 by the BRAIN project. It was a 3 day event connecting 5 auditoriums located in Spain, Portugal and Switzerland. Speakers and attendees could attend in any of the sites. ISABEL connected over pioneering ATM broadband infrastructures to demonstrate the power of broadband applications. This anniversary event will connect again participants from all over the world.

The ISABEL application was created in 1993 in the ISABEL project at UPM (Univ. Politécnica de Madrid). The ISABEL team, was leaded by Juan Quemada and included initially: Tomas de Miguel, Arturo Azcorra, Santiago Pavón, Joaquín Salvachúa, David Larrabeiti and Manuel Petit.

The application got operational only in 1994 within the IBER project when it was used to organize, ABC94, the second BRAIN Summer School on Advanced Broadband Communication as a distributed event connecting 5 sites: two in Madrid (Telefónica I+D and UPM), two in Aveiro (CET and the University of Aveiro), and one in Basel.

This first event used the Telefónica RECIBA ATM testbed at Telefónica I+D in Madrid, set up by Pedro Chas and his team: Andres Gonzalez Molina, Pedro Lizcano, Francisco Herrera, Luis Merayo, Juan Ignacio Solana and others. RECIBA was connected with a 155Mbps link to the UPM site in Madrid set up by the ISABEL team.

In 1994 the state of the art videoconferencing systems available where point-to-point with dedicated ISDN connections sending only audio and video. Multipoint conference systems required the expensive H320 MCU hardware and were very rigid.

RECIBA was also connected with a 34Mbps line to the RIA ATM testbed at CET in Aveiro, set up by Vasco Lagarto and his team: Jose Domigues, Joao Bastos, Francisco Fontes and others. RIA was connected with a 34 Mbps link to the University of Aveiro site set up by Manuel de Oliveira, Rui Aguiar & others. The Basel site and ATM testbed were connected to RIA by a 2Mps satellite link. This activity was coordinated by Martin Potts and others.

ISABEL supported collaborative video-conferencing with a floor control coordinating the proper configuration of audio, video, slides, pointers and other multimedia components. ISABEL workstations were connected with TCP/IP over the ATM and satellite broadband infrastructures.

Isabel was then the only high-quality multicast-capable video-conference application featuring various qualities of services for different types of connections. This allowed seamless interconnection over ATM of sites at 10 Mb/s, with sites connecting with links ranging from 128Kb/s to 2Mb/s. In ABC96, the 4th Summer School, over 20 sites were connected with the different bandwidths needed to reach all the remote sites.

All this was made possible by the ecosystem created by European programs, with large collaborations among operators (Telefónica, Portugal Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, etc.), research (UPM, U. Aveiro, IJS, BADLab, etc.), companies (Telscom, Martel, etc.), NRENs and many others, mainly in the context of RACE and ACTS projects like ISABEL, BRAIN, IBER, EXPLOIT, BINET, CATALYST, EXPERT, NICE, BETEUS, TECODIS, etc.

The initial deployment of broadband infrastructures needed by ISABEL was supported mainly by Telecom Operators. But the NRENs started broadband deployments soon: GEANT in Europe, RedIris in Spain and all European NRENs, CANARIE in Canada, Internet2 in the USA, Red CLARA in Latinamerica, Ubuntunet in Africa, etc.

ABC94 was the start of the forthcoming events and services. The first service was the tele-conference service. It was designed to support distributed conferences, like the BRAIN Summer Schools. The next Summer School in 1995, ABC’95, connected over 10 sites and ABC’96 over 20 sites in 1996. Many others followed, like the IDC, the IST or the Telecom I+D series of distributed conferences.

In 1996 the TECODIS project created the ISABEL tele-work service. It was designed to support more informal distributed work meetings and was used in a large number of project meetings throughout the life of Isabel.

The tele-class service was developed at the same time in the BONAPARTE project. It was designed to support distributed classrooms for collaborative courses among universities. For example the BONAPARTE courses between Basel, Hamburg, Madrid and Torino; the IBA course run for over 10 years between Madrid (UPM, UC3M), Barcelona (UPC) and Valencia (UPV); or others involving Univ. of Murcia, Telecom Paris, INICTEL in Peru and many others.

The porting of ISABEL to IPv6 started in 1997 in the SABA project and continued in European projects like LONG, 6LINK or Euro6IX. The members of the ISABEL team doing the main work were Tomas de Miguel, Santiago Pavón, Gabriel Huecas, Manuel Petit, Eva Castro, David Fernandez, Omar Walid and Carlos Barcenilla. It was probably the first complex application completely ported to the new version of the IP Protocol. An IPv6 porting guide was generated with a summary of the experience, which was used as a reference in several IPv6 Task Forces. ISABEL was used distribute the first IPv6 Summits over the first IPv6 enabled infrastructures.

In 1999 Agora Systems S.A. (a UPM spin-off company) was created to support commercial deployment of Isabel collaborative platforms. The cofounders where the more stable members of the ISABEL team at that time, namely Juan Quemada, Tomas de Miguel, Santiago Pavón, Gabriel Huecas, Tomás Robles, Manuel Petit, Eva Castro, Fernando Echevarrieta and Hector Velayos, complemented by persons coming from the corporate world, like Eulogio Naz from Artur D. Little and Luis Rodriguez Ovejero of SATEC.

The Github organization GING contains the last software versions of ISABEL, the complete list of people contributing during all this years to it , as well as other software projects of the group. GING (Grupo Internet de Nueva Generación) is the actual name of the ISABEL Team and is leaded also by Juan Quemada.

After two decades of creating collaboration services and events, ISABEL did not survive the emergence of the cloud for Internet service provision. The ISABEL software evolved first to support Flash technologies. It was finally transformed around 2012 into Lynckia/Licode (http://lynckia.com/ licode , https://github.com/lynckia/licode ) a scalable cloud enabled WebRTC MCU. The members of the ISABEL team doing the main work were Joaquín Salvachua, Javier Cerviño, Pedro Rodriguez and Alvaro Alonso. Lynckia/Licode was released as open software project in GitHub. It was the only MCU ready when the first chrome version supporting WebRTC appeared. Lynckia/Licode is being used today to implement real time voice and video collaboration by companies like, MashMe.io, Minerva Schools at KGI, knuddles, ...

The Lynckia/Licode based “Room of the Future” created by MashMe.io is probably the closest service to what we did in the “old ISABEL events”. It will be used in the 25th ISABEL Anniversary to connect again old ISABEL sites participating in events during so many years with the new Rooms.