The Story of New Zealand's Internet

Transcription

Vincent Heeringa – Publisher, Idealog

“The first experience of the Internet in a professional capacity was probably email, and I distinctly remember – and it seems hilarious now – but this is within my own working life, that there was a computer in the corner called ‘the Internet computer’ and we had to book time to go there and download our emails and search on the ‘Internet thing’ and the day that that got taken out of the corner and put onto our individual machines was a completely radical experience. I remember having a conversation with my boss about it and he said that surfing the net was a complete waste of time so there needed to be controls about it. We had an argument about, “Do you control the time I spend on the phone because isn’t that just the same thing?”. And no, it wasn’t, it was a completely different thing. So that moment that it came from out of the corner and onto my machine was a completely transformative moment.”