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25 years ago, in the basement of the University of Aveiro, the Portuguese Pointer Service was born, a special frog, which began as a joke by six students and is today the largest portal in the Portuguese language.
Although the university adjoins wetlands, the natural habitat of frogs, it was not the amphibian animal of the same name, but it was the largest information site and pointer in Portuguese on the Internet that knew the light of day, for a joke. student and that, on Friday 25 years, was born a few years before, for example, Google.
Founded in 1995, SAPO, portal and provider of Internet products and services in Portuguese, has already exceeded one million daily views and “procreate”, spreading to Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique and Timor-Leste, in descendant frogs, some more larvae, others more adult.
Far from imagining, in that year 1995, the group of six friends who attended university in a quiet city that would have so much success the game they created in the so-called “catacombs”, more precisely where today the University medical post is located. of Aveiro. .
Helder Bernardo considered “SAPO’s father” for having named him, recalls the enthusiasm of those days of improvisation, of which he still keeps some curious objects, such as the first advertisement that SAPO had, drawn by him on a blackboard and painted in hand. .
The city of Aveiro still did not have the Lago da Fonte Nova or the tourist tours in Moliceiro boats, the Praça do Peixe did not know the nightlife it has today and the University itself, currently with about 15 thousand students, was only then. six thousand.
“There were several propitious and ideal situations for this to happen. The city of Aveiro was a downturn at night and we had nothing to do, so we went to the University’s Computer Center to have internet access ”, explains Helder Bernardo.
This ease of access and the encouragement of the University of Aveiro to continue with the game was decisive: “the fact that the University realized the potential and let us continue the game was crucial. It gave us the conditions, gave us support domain, we used the resources, because the machines were in their computer center and provided legal support when necessary. Basically, the University had the vision of letting us continue with the story “, Helder Bernardo told Lusa.
Of the six creators of SAPO, the majority went to Lisbon, continuing in the area of systems development, spread over several companies and only two continue to work at the University of Aveiro.
“As we were in the academy, we had the opportunity to have a vision of what the Internet was and what it was going to be, because there was no Internet in people’s homes,” he recalls.
The Internet was “almost an academic channel” and the initial objective of the six friends was to collect the addresses of the Portuguese pages that existed, most of them created in Portuguese universities, like a telephone directory. “Everything fits on one A4 sheet.”
Helder Bernardo, considered one of the first, if not the first, Portuguese webdesigner, explains that this primacy is attributed to him because it was part of the interface and all the graphic part of the portal.
“In the group of six, each had their specialization. I was the graphic that was part of the ‘webdesign’ and I took care of the email, then there was the public relations person who was the oldest of us, Fernando Cozinheiro, who was fundamental because he had the appropriate knowledge that allowed him to create the domain ‘toad .pt ‘”, describes.
“Celso Martinho, who later joined PT, was the programmer, Benjamim Júnior was in charge of the server and my brother Sérgio Bernardo and João Martins searched the Internet for addresses to catalog”, Helder Bernardo recalls. .
The name was chosen by him and caused a controversy within the academic community with biologists because SAPO, after all, was represented by a green frog.
“We went around saying that the service was called SAPO, but the people who worked on it were Frogs as pointer registrars and it happened,” he explains.
Helder now admits that in addition to fitting the name ‘Online Portuguese Pointer Service’, the inspiration came from the Cocas frog, the trendy Jim Henson TV show character Os Marretas, and the figure chosen was actually a frog, “a cuter animal.”
Since then, SAPO has taken several leaps: in 1997 a company was created for its commercial exploitation, which two years later was acquired by the PT group, witnessing its professionalization.
In 2002, SAPO began targeting broadband content and currently offers video, mail, blogging and mapping services to its users.
