Remember their first encounters with this Internet thing.
New Zealand nearly didn't get the Internet that day. After years of waiting, negotiating and technology advancements, the key piece of hardware arrived broken. With no manual.
View 1989 › or Start at 1989“Usenet via tape. There’s a thing! We used to get several months worth of Usenet on half-inch tape, load it up... and we read it!”
“The first thing I saw were the Fish disks for the Amiga. They were a set of software utilities but they came with a set of descriptions all posted through Usenet. Of course, by the time I got to them they had been exchanged by floppy disks, but that was the first realisation that there was something going on out there that was rather bigger than just exchanging by floppy disk. We had been playing around with things like BBSes and XXXX (1:04) BBSes but they were very self-contained. We could see that hooking these things together in some way could be very useful.”
“I’d been involved in this in the UK. I worked at the University of Newcastle in the north of England and we had email and we had a network, although it wasn’t the Internet as such. In the UK, just like with lots of other things, we’re driving on the left-hand-side of the road like the Americans drive on the right and they had their own set of protocols. In fact, the addresses went the other way round, so instead of having vuw.ac.nz, their format was uk.ac.newcastle. so everything was back-to-front. But we had a gateway to the rest of the Internet through University College London. I came out here in ’89, which was around the time of the milestone we’re talking about. I was dead keen to have access back to this as I wanted to talk back home. I suppose that was one of my interests and why I wanted it. But I was used to seeing it and to sending an email. You could see that it was just fantastic.”