That first contact was a result of Pietrak’s several months of co-operation with Krzysztof Heller – a physicist of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow; they had both consciously aimed to bring the Internet to Poland. A major role was also played by the establishment of NASK in spring 1991. Originally, NASK was a coordinating team of the Scientific and Academic Computer Network at the Warsaw University. The team’s mission was to organise computer communications for the Polish scholarly and academic community.

Before that, since 1989, a group of enthusiasts in the Polish science and academia circles had worked towards Poland’s being included in EARN (European and Academic Research Network) – the European branch of the BITNET (Because It's Time Net) network. They also spontaneously tried to break the American embargo on exports of modern computer and telecommunications technologies to the former Eastern bloc countries.

Maciej Kozłowski, the present managing director of NASK took an active part in those endeavours. This is how he recollects the early times: The complete hooking up of Poland to the global Internet happened only around 20th December 1991, when the US “raised the barrier”, giving us Internet access to the whole world. In that very moment, our Internet included the local networks at the Physics Department of the Warsaw University (approximately 40 computers) and at the University’s Astronomical Observatory (about 10), at the Astronomical Centre of the Polish Academy of Science (PAN; about 20), at the Cracow-based Institute of Nuclear Physics (about 10), and single computers at the Jagiellonian University, at Cyfronet in Cracow, plus some other in Toruń, Katowice, and obviously the central communication node located at the building of the Warsaw University’s IT Centre. However, a big campus network of Warsaw Technical University was ready for connection (importantly, its construction involved fibre-optics), and a similar inter-academic campus network was under construction in Cracow.

He further adds: From the perspective of developing the Internet in Poland, the most important point was the decision taken by the Scientific Research Committee on 11th June 1993, to build metropolitan area networks at eleven academic centres in Poland: Warsaw, Cracow, Poznań, Wrocław, Toruń, Gdańsk, Katowice/Gliwice, Łódź, Szczecin, Rzeszów, and Lublin (the number of those centres was subsequently raised to 21). Resources were also allocated to extending NASK’s network framework in Poland.

Construction of some of those networks went ahead quite impressively. The biggest of them – the Warsaw metropolitan network of WARMAN – was built in the ATM technology as one of the first wide area networks in Europe. NASK’s nationwide network was the first Frame Relay network in Poland and was made operational much earlier than the analogical network of Telekomunikacja Polska.

The first nationwide study of the community of Internet users was done at the order of NASK in October 1995. For a long time, results of that questionnaire remained the only source of knowledge about Polish users of the Internet. The community was small and not too diversified in the social sense at that time – the Internet was mainly used by degree-educated males, most of them academics, which prompted the "Rzeczpospolita" daily, commenting on the study, to term the Polish Internet '95 as the "network of educated males". The same „Rzeczpospolita” reported in September 1995 that „…by the end of the year, the number of computers connected to the NASK network will reach 40,000, and the number of users 200-400 thousand”. The forecast was underestimated: as soon as in October 1995, the number of Internet users in Poland reached half a million.

Maria Baranowska, manager of the Public Relations Team at NASK, says: Development of the Polish Internet was originally associated with meeting the needs of the science and academic community – following a pattern similar to many other countries. Not many people outside knew what Internet is and what it can be used for. That is why, in the first years, we at NASK focused on promoting knowledge on the Internet and on the new potential the Net created. Naturally, we could not foresee all developments at those times, but there were moments when we felt that it is a breakthrough. One of those was in June 1994, at the computer fair at the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, with the official demonstration of the Polish WWW server created at the Physics Department of Warsaw University – a development driven by Jacek Gajewski, another co-worker of NASK’s, a pioneer and enthusiast of the Internet. For several years that server hosted the predecessor of all Polish portals – Polska Strona Domowa, (Polish Home Page).