The Story of New Zealand's Internet

Transcription

John Hine – Dean of Engineering, Victoria University of Wellington

“I left England in ’77 to come to New Zealand and we didn’t have email and stuff sailing around England at the time. But you had other universities near, you saw a lot more, it was so easy to move around the continent to conferences. You really were part of a continental community and then suddenly, you come to New Zealand and there’s nothing to do but write letters to people – especially if you were in Computer Science in the ‘70s. I was the first person with a degree in Computer Science at Vic. There were some other people teaching Computing. I think Canterbury and Auckland definitely had a few. Maybe if you were coming into Marine Science or Geology it would have been different but in Computer Science it was really isolated. For me, it was just this idea that New Zealand could have been part of the world and participating. I think that’s proven to be true. I can’t believe that Peter Jackson could have built Weta here without, not necessarily the Internet, but without communications capability.