Stories: The Internet
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Am I the only one round here who used Internet in the 'eighties? When I went up to Nottingham University in 1983, I met Janet - the Joint Academic Network. Strictly speaking, she wasn't Internet but a private network of universities which plugged their Crays into one another.
And so I did Art History on a Cray plugged into a proto-Internet. I sometimes tell this to smug nerds when they boast about being Internet pioneers (as well as having a collection of Star Trek figurines way before anyone else). I particularly enjoy telling them the 'doing Art History' part: folks don't realise how Art Historians grasped the possibilities of Internet early on.
Am I also the only person alive who uses an apostrophe for truncated words like 'eighties or 'cello?
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I think we can say confidently that cello has become a word in itself.
And eighties is already a word in itself, the reference to the decade is only one possible use.
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Am I also the only person alive who uses an apostrophe for truncated words like 'eighties or 'cello?
I know at least one person who uses it for 'phone.
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Am I the only one round here who used Internet in the 'eighties?
I used Pacnet in the late '80s. I don't remember much about it though. I do remember being able to access the vehicle registration database thing back then, and looking up the license plates of the cars driven by kids at my school.
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First: 1991 at National Library as part of TuiaNet planning
Worst: Heh, so many. Using any Netscape browser from v4 onwards. Pointcast News anyone? The Iridium satellite network, pretty cool actually, just burn that money in a great big bonfire...
Actually, the thing I remember best was bringing Internet into the Tasman District for the first time in 1994 with the help of Chris O'Donoghue from Planet Nelson. It's hard to communicate just how exciting it was starting up a whole new type of communications technology in our region and taking it on the road to show people. We had bags of 14.4 modems and were literally setting up PC's in the children's or newspaper areas of small public libraries and were getting reasonable groups of interested people turning up for their first ever look at the Internet. It felt like times were changing quickly and completely and it was a real buzz.
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One Saturday in 1997, I joined my friend Andrew Black and several others at his corporate reserve seating for a test match at Eden Park. Until recently, the corporate reserve seats were the blocks in the middle of the South Stand, with a fridge at the end of each.
As a fairly dull afternoon's cricket unfolded, the fridge was refilled more than once. We hailed Barry Jenkin and bid him join us. Later , we adjourned to Barry's place, where certain activities left a prominent music management figure somewhat unwell. Eventually, I decided that this disreputable day should be drawn to a close, and helped the young manager into a taxi.
As I sashayed somewhat unsteadily into my house, my darling greeted me: "Well, thanks for letting me know you were going to be gone for hours and hours -- and by the way, your editor rang and Telecom is suing you."
This was very difficult news to process in the circumstances, and I was fairly speechlees. But it was true. A mocking story I had written for the IDGNet website the day before had caused a certain under-pressure Telecom executive to snap, and at his urging, Telecom had somehow got a judge to convene in a room at Trentham race course. (As per a later legal agreement, I can't go into the details of the story, but, basically, although I was quite right in the story, the matter going to court could have made life difficult for a couple of other people.)
Trouble was, they hadn't been able to find me (nobody thought to try Eden Park, clearly). But I went into my office, and there it was, on my computer: I had just become the first person in New Zealand to be served with notice of defamation action by email.
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Got my PC with modem on my student loan in 98 (back when you paid interest on it, but before they stopped you taking lump sums). The first few months were pretty dull, with a bit of faffing round on email and the alt newsgroups, although I was taken aback by the binaries people would post from time to time on newusers. I didn't know any actual sites that could hold my attention.
But then, my favourite New Zealand director started making films of my favourite books, and I wanted to know more. The TV and print news was utterly useless on the subject, but I figured the internet was the place to find fellow geeks. The various LOTR fansites introduced me to what the internet was actually capable of (better, faster and more accurate content tailored to niche audiences), and from there a whole world opened.
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The first website to hold my attention was Fat Chicks in Party Hats
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My university job was commercial cleaning in the Waikato University computer labs. Being a keen student of fucking around when I should be working (hey, it's what I'm doing right now), I soon discovered I could logon to the VAX computers and browse newsgroups. The first to truly grab my attention was the 'Revenge' newsgroup, I couldn't believe people would A) write and B) share this stuff. I thought it was amazing.
Second memory is talking to the Sysadmin at my first proper job. We'd been connected to the internet for about six months (this is about 1995), and I asked him how many people were using it. "There's everyone else" he said, waving his left had around his knee. "And there's you", waving his right hand as high in the air as he could.
I'd better do some work now. Ahem.
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Am I the only one round here who used Internet in the 'eighties? When I went up to Nottingham University in 1983, I met Janet - the Joint Academic Network.
I'd forgotten all about Janet, it was still being used when I started working in the Universities in the early 90s as well. I can't remember though wether it was here or at Leicester Univesity that I used it.
When I was an undergrad student in 1988 we were each allowed a single Medline search for our honours 3rd year biochem paper. You had to choose the words you selected with care as it cost over $100 a search and the librarian entered in your selection before going home for the night. In the morning you got a print out and went to the lbirary with your photocopying card in hand.
It may not sound like much now, but it sure was easier and quicker than pouring through Index Medicus etc with a ruler and a pad and paper.
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'Wow, this is going to be big" moment:
Signing up for Hotmail and finding out fifty thousand other people had it too.Dumbest moment :
Hours of frustration setting up my first account with Telecom. I was on the phone for ages before the surprisingly patient chap asked me how I had spelled Xtra: with an 'e', how else? -
Xtra: with an 'e', how else?
Snap, only I was with Woosh, not Whoosh. Why do they do it?
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Can words be copyrighted?
Yes they can.
It's also (I understand) the primary reason that PC chips changed from 286, 386 etc, to 'pentium'. You can't legally protect a number, you can protect a name.
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Can words be copyrighted?
Yes they can.
I'm pretty sure they can't. Brand names can be trademarked, though, along with the logos.
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Very early 90s I was hunting music by a then obscure New York jazz player. Visiting NY, I tried possible record shops but could only get the one recording I already had. I couldn't find his details from the phone book.
Back home in suburban Auckland, I posted a message on a rec.music group (the main amusement of the net then were newsgroups) asking if anyone had heard of the player. I think it was my first ever net posting. Ten minutes later there was a reply from a New York woman called Patrice who had a list of the obscure Japanese cassettes he had issued with addresses how i could track them down in japan.
We emailed , she did not know anything of New Zealand and couldn't understand how i could have heard of him. She tried to send me a document with all the details but in those days the net connection was fraught, kept crashing, cost I think about $10 an hour and ended up costing me about $150 before I could retrieve it! It later turned out she knew him and gave me his postal address (he wasn't online), and we exchanged postcards!
All that wandering around New York looking for his music and yet 10 minutes back home I got all the info I needed -and made contact with him . I knew then there was something very special about this new medium! -
1992. The year a good friend died, and I stupidly broke my pelvis. The year I bought a PC via American Express. The year I could actually afford to do such a crazy thing. It arrived in 3 large boxes. There was a heap of instruction manuals, all in...notquiteEnglish. It took me the best part of a day to translate those; organise the components; insert the programming floppies, and switch it all on-
in big red letters filling the screen: INSTALLATION FAIL-
2 PCs later (both of which - despite preventitive programmes - became heavily infected with viri - including one which randomly emailed out portions of my supersecret writings to my email correspondence list-who were understandably astonished) and I read about the Apple iMac...I still have the little Luxo. Damn shame you cant upgrade it...speaking of which, I am seeking the winning Lotto ticket so I can upgrade my now rather battered 2005 iMac (aue! it turned out to be one of the lemons!) for a shiny new 24inch aluminium job...
my day begins with music (generally classical guitar,) B-Boost, coffee, and a selection of news sites. It isnt a coincidence that I no longer listen to radio news (except on RSS feeds) or watch tv news
(except as youtube extracts or on the BBC or CNN websites.) And may I mention sites like Amazon & Abe books whereby my cooking & fishing libraries have been considerably enhanced?And as for communication! Waua! Everyone from my mother, to my family in Oz, to friends I'll never meet, to friends I havent met for years, hell- even my neighbours! (Whom I like incidentally!)
I'm not interested in any kind of prize for commenting - I'm very interested/entertained/lucky to be *able* to comment here (and elsewhere.) And, without the 'net, I'd never have discovered my sexuality...
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Not quite an internet experience, but my first with computers. My father is a genius and back in the 1970s he built a machine that played Pong.
It saved me socially, kids flocked to be my friend
He took me to the old DSIR computer room which was capable of playing this text based game of working out how to land on the moon inputting the lander's thruster and length of time you used them for.
We thought it was so cool, a room full of technology to do that. We wondered if we could have that at home.
From there he took me through the old TSR and commmodores, each doing stuff we though was incredible at the time.
He explained to me the concept of the internet at the time, but it went way over both our heads.
It sounds like ancient history and I am 43
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First up, I really hope that the book is on sale in mid-september, as thats when we are coming back to NZ for two weeks, and I'd love to get a copy!
My main problem with this is how to string it all together, and where to start. My memory around then is rather disjointed.
Like a lot of people, I started with BBS's before "teh internets" were really around, but in my first year of uni (94), I got a taste via friends who had access from the auckland university network, and from the original NZ ISP: ICONZ. I remember grabbing Wolfenstien 3D off UseNet when it came out, waiting for hours for the 4 or 5 megs of files to come down on the 14K modem, before playing it, and promptly going out to buy a new computer which could actually RUN it. iD software drive my upgrade cycle for a number of years.
But my first real memory of the internet was more the other side of it. Somehow (I dont remember how, but I think Hamish Guthrey or his brother Chris had something to do with it) we (Damon Maria, Nick Virtue and I) managed to start working, kinda, for ICONZ, back in the days BEFORE PPP, when you dialed up to a unix box, and ran mail, or pico, or something. Everything was on the command line, and ICONZ was in a Cave.
Well, not really but it felt like it. They were in Airdale St in the middle of Auckland, about 100m from the big telecom black box on Mayoral Dr, in a room which is quite a bit smaller than our (small) apartment here in London, with no windows, at all, and about 8 people (Terry Hardie, Rowan Smith, Chris (who part owned it), Kim Schienberg, Richard Ram, Keri Ikitoa, and a few others), and a piece of 10base2 running out the back to the "other" ISP, aka IHUG, which was in an even smaller room out the back. I think the Wood brothers had the first internet cafe on Elliot St. InternetStopShop or something. It was pretty cool.
This was back in the days when email was $50/meg and data was $10/meg. A 256K line was shared between the WHOLE country (via Waikato uni), and a 28.8K modem was the fastest thing on the planet. We were granted free accounts (yay! staff discount!) but asked not to download too much, especially the big images from NASA, which I think were about 5-10meg each.
The modem room was literally that - a small room (large closet) with about 50 or so 28K modems stacked on top of each other, with a massive birds nest of phone cables, serial cables and power cables coming out the back. There were desk fans pointing at it all, trying to keep them cool. The noise was deafening. When it came time to move from there, it took HOURS to untangle the cables, and I dont recall it being much tidier when it was all reassembled at the other end.
Those were fun days tho, hand-stuffing invoices into envelopes with the owners - everyone just mucked in, from the owners to the office girl. It was really fun, and it paid for another years worth of uni for me.
We (Damon, Nick and me, AKA Xerxes Ltd) wrote the first graphical installer for ICONZ, complete with Netscape 0.99, Windows Trumpet PPP dialer etc. It fitted on two 3.5" floppys, and was written in either Turbo Pascal or Delphi 1.0, I can't remember which. But it worked nicely, and it stopped us having to visit quite as many people to install the 'net for them. (I found an old disk just before I moved out of the flat we were living in, in 2001 or so, which had the whole thing on it. I think Damon still has it somewhere, tho none of us have 3.5" drives anymore!)
Yes, you read that right. In 1994/1995, we (as kinda-employee's of ICONZ) used to visit people's houses, usually for about $75/hour, to setup the internet for them. It was always fun doing the odd trip around Auckland to set it up, and the people were always really grateful for the help.
Then there was the help desk. At the time there was, I think, about 4 people doing helpdesk. We either had PC's, or Sun X terminals, which made it really fun to try and support Mac's, without having one. I was the mac guy, and I could setup PPP etc on a mac from memory - just closed my eyes and imagined the screens, and it seemed to work. Oh how the world has turned, as Im typing this on my macbook, having been a PC weenie for the 13 or so years in between.
Anyway, thats enough for now. The 'net is now so much a part of my life, I don't think about it anymore. It's just there. I have access to it almost everywhere, thanks to my iphone, which has somewhere around 100x the power and space of the machines (Sun Sparc 20) which literally ran the ICONZ. But it's become a utility - it's lost it's new shininess. I've made a lot of friends thru the internet, most of whom I see in the big blue room more than I see online. I just realised the other day I've been doing software development for nearly 20 years (I'm only 33!), and being paid for it for 16. I've been on the internet about as long - for the full 20 years if you count BBS's. This is about as close as I can get to the kids of today, who dont know a world without it.
But I'd still love to know what RussB and Kim went off to talk about during the ICONZ wake in Ponsonby, after it was sold to Melco. Maybe he'll tell us (privately) some time :)
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I bowed low before my first mainframe computer at Otago University in 1972. This was a voracious beast, feasting in the middle of the night on punchcards offered up by acolytes who all belonged to the mysterious "Operator" clan. As a novice Computer Sciences student I did try my very best not to fold, bend, spindle or mutilate those cards, which bore the mighty name of International Business Machines emblazoned on their surface; yet, despite my toils, the Big Iron machine often spat out my pitiful offerings, deriding my feeble ability to interpret the coded language of my masters. Clearly I was unworthy and was cast out into the wilderness of the real world, to settle for infamy and fortune in the advertising industry instead.
'Twas not until the very early eighties that I had my own personal dalliance with another computer, in the form of a Radio Shack model controlled by cassette instructions. Its skills were humble and so were mine -- the two of us never achieved very much together. I enjoyed a rather more fruitful relationship with an IBM-PC-clone in the mid-eighties ... but that's another story.
My first encounter with the joys of online connection came circa 1985 thanks to media research house McNair (now Nielsen), which began offering dual-channel television audience research data through a dial-up service. Participating advertising agencies paid a healthy fee to connect to this data through a dumb terminal and something called a modem. This mystical box clicked, whistled and hummed to itself before making a remote connection at the incredible speed of some 90 Bits Per Second. At that speed, the information was all text-based, displayed on a black screen in growing green letters for us all to admire. The TV viewing data itself, gathered from diaries, was a mere ten days old -- previously it had been supplied to us in booklet form some two weeks after the broadcast week, so this was a significant improvement.
My first internet-like experience came in 1987, when then-giant US online service provider CompuServe extended its network to Australia and New Zealand. For a mere US$2 a minute (at dialup speeds approaching 300bps!), I could access up to 750 proprietary databases, tapping into a subset of the world's knowledge. At the time it proved a valuable but expensive new business tool -- especially costly since each database charged an additional fee (sometimes as much as US$15) for each news item downloaded. Not quite the business model powering the internet today ...
My worst experiences in the online space dated from those days, as I opened up my monthly credit card statement with great trepidation. CompuServe used to suck its funds directly out of my Visa account, and I have a barely-repressed memory of the numbers reaching four figures on at least one occasion. CompuServe had a pricing/gouging model that would have made even Telecom (in its most predatory days pre-unbundling) look kind-hearted.
In the early nineties along came the worldwide web, and I joined the other early adopters trying Netscape 1.0 and seeing those glorious grey HTML backgrounds that defined internet-with-pictures. Those were the days when you could actually publish a printed directory aiming to list all the country's web addresses and be confident that you had it 95% complete and up-to-date.
Bit of a blank as to how we all got from there to BitTorrent, LinkedIn, Skype, Trade Me et al ...
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Why do they do it?
Can words be copyrighted?
It's not about copyright. It's a trademark issue.
You can't trademark a dictionary word. If I want to trademark my product called Heater, I couldn't. But if I fleshed it out into several words (__Robyn's Nice Heater__) or made it a non-dictionary word (__Heatr__), I could trademark that.
Xtra and Woosh aren't dictionary words. Unlike Extra and Whoosh, no one else is using them. So Xtra gets to just be Xtra and not Extra Internet Services (for example).
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I got involved with the Net around late 1993 I think. A good friend and work mate had just left the comforting embrace of ANZ to work for some company called ICONZ.
Soon after, another friend of mine from ANZ went and joined him. I was still at ANZ, but very soon after I scored a 9600 baud modem and discovered the joys of PINE, TIN, etc thanks to them. At the time there were very few of us, so you could pretty much have any email address you wanted. For the record, I was mark@central.co.nz for a long time.
I fondly remember visiting Jeremy at the Wellington ICONZ office and him showing me Mosaic over sLip. That was pretty cool, despite the horrors of tweaking connection scripts.
I ended up working for ICONZ for a couple of months in 1995 while waiting for a VISA to enter the US to work. I worked mostly out of the Wellington office with Jeremy (No.16 The Terrace), but had occasion to visit the rats nest in Auckland a few times.
The description of the facilities in Auckland is no lie.
Also contrary to the above, I actually wrote the first graphical installer for ICONZ in late 1994, at Jeremy's request, using a very early version of VB. Since I was still working for the Bank at the time, and knee deep in the Post Office integration, I didn't have a lot of time to maintain the code base, so it was eventually farmed out to a 3rd party company. Nic, I am guessing that was u? The software packages in the installer were constantly changing, so keeping the installer up to date was a nightmare.
When I was working for ICONZ I worked on a customer management / invoicing application, using the raw data that Rowan provided from the router. Nasty stuff. There were not a lot of options for storing relational data. You could drop it into btrieve or use a flat text file basically.
I never did finish that app as my VISA came thru soon after and I was off to Texas.
BTW. I just looked at the list of people in the book. Why the hell are Chris Thorpe (Toph!), Jeremy Clyma, and John Clarke not mentioned?
Must admit I am glad to see that Kim Schienburg is not mentioned. I was around when she came storming in from NY. Personally I did not like her at all. She was a stereo typical New Yorker. Arrogant, brash, loud and full of shite. Her entrance was the beginning of the end as far I was concerned.
Fun times indeed. I am fairly sure my toaster has a higher bit rate than NZ had back then.
Cheers
Mark Nash
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One day in the heady summer of 1990, driving from Hamilton to Auckland in a fine Ford Cortina MK1 I picked up an interesting looking hitchhiker. Turns out he was an American student living on a houseboat somewhere on the banks of the Mississippi. We exchanged names, I told him I was about to start University, I dropped him at the airport and we left it there.
A few months later in a first year Law and Technology tutorial we were issued with our brand spanking new university email addresses (somewhat clunky I recall) and with great excitement and some earnestness we fired up our email programmes for the first time on our large boxy Apples. What excitement when I found an email in my inbox. From Outside The University even; sent from somewhere near the banks of the Mississippi. On reflection, (the Ford Cortina has long since gone, ahhhhh) what an inspiring start (hey we are talking nearly 18 years ago, pre-google, probably just about pre-search engine era, – how did he track me down?) of a life and love affair with the marvellousness of the Internet.
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BTW. I just looked at the list of people in the book. Why the hell are Chris Thorpe (Toph!), Jeremy Clyma, and John Clarke not mentioned?
They are, they're just not listed in the index. That seems to be the case for a lot of people, including me. I've just been leafing through the "Pioneering ISPs" chapter, and discovered that not only am I quoted on Xtra's original basket-case billing system (I'll get back to that when I have more time), there's a photograph of Maurice Williamson presenting me with a Tuanz award in 1995.
I'm quite pleased to see my stories from the "ISP wars" quoted. That was a really fun time to be on the internet beat. It was all new, new enough for there to be cowboys and cock-ups.
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You can't trademark a dictionary word.
You mean to say we can band together, form a computer company and send turtleneck boy to the poorhouse? I'm in!
Ach, no, Apple and the Apple logo are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.
You can trademark a dictionary word in a limited context. So for instance I could start an Apple company that sells knitted sweathers, so long as I wasn't ripping off the logo or marketing said sweathers as iKnits, or do anything else that might piss off the iLawyers. It's not copyrighting a word, of course, which is why English speakers worldwide can still buy apples and talk about apples without prior written consent from Cupertino.
So I think they could have called the company Extra, so long as it wasn't already trademarked in a related commercial field. Maybe it was, maybe they thought it was snappier. Or they hate dyslexics. I know one of my very first emails ever was to my brother-in-law in NZ and it duly bounced for that very reason.
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I still have this 2000 news story on my hard drive. Tyler had been hand-picked by Rod Deane to to launch Xtra in 1996. He was extremely intense and, it appeared, mildly crazy. He was also the source of lawsuit I mentioned upthread.
Towards the end of his time with Telecom we'd be calling the Telecom press people politely enquiring where Chris Tyler actually was. I found out much later, but that's a story to tell over a few drinks, rather than on a public forum.
**Solution 6 boss throws in towel**
By Russell Brown
Controversial former Xtra chief Chris Tyler has resigned as CEO of Solution 6, after embarrassing press revelations about his past.
Among those revelations was the fact that when he was hired to work at Xtra in 1995 he may still have been serving a 10-year suspended sentence imposed in Dallas, Texas, for possession of more than 20 kilograms of marijuana in 1985, along with a $US5000 fine.
Tyler had not disclosed the conviction to his employer or shareholders, nor his involvement with the spectacularly failed Vancouver company Lessonware. Last week he held a press conference to confront those reports and others.
BRW, the Australian business magazine which began the furore by revealing details of Tyler's past, is to publish a follow-up this week, covering Tyler's time in New Zealand. It appears the events of Tyler's brief but exciting reign at Xtra - the time of what became popularly known as "the ISP wars" - have not been well known to his Australian employers. Tyler went to Solution 6 in early 1997 with a glowing endorsement from Telecom.
Although he has faced questions about Lessonware, and about his public promise to take Solution 6 shares to $A100, it appears to be the drug conviction that has harmed Tyler's position most. Telstra, which is still majority government-owned, holds a quarter of Solution 6.
In a statement to the ASX last week, Solution 6 said Tyler and the board of the company had "mutually agreed that in the light of recent events it is now in the best interest of shareholders" for Tyler to resign.
At a press conference the previous week Tyler claimed that he had no intention of leaving Solution 6 and ridiculed rumours that his chief operating officer Lindsay Yelland would be offered his job. But yesterday Yelland was appointed as acting CEO and MD.
It is not yet known whether Tyler will retain his 10% option in the company, valued at close to $A50 million, but he will continue to receive his $A700,000 salary for acting as an advisor for the next six months.
Solution 6 shares rose strongly on the ASX last week and at one point were trading at $3.89, up 30% on the day.
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