Posts by Mark Harris
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Am I the only one creeped out that the play-out music was a cheesy "Isn't she lovely"?
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First? Computer club at school, c.1975, punching out chads from Portapunch Fortran cards which would then be sent to Databank for processing. If you'd been careful with the paperclip and lucky with your syntax, you'd get a printout in about a week's time.
10 years later, bought my first Commodore (Plus/4 about 2 weeks before Commodore canned them), and then a 64. There was this disk that came with it called QuantumLink and I so desperately wanted to be part of it but it was US only :-(
By 89 I had a 'real' PC - a Sharp 4500 luggable (barely - I still get shoulder pain memories) and a 2400 modem, accessing bulletin boards like Actrix and finding stuff from this thing called the Internet (remember the Gemstone file?)
About that time I was working with Mr Nash above at the ANZ (I won a beer from him based on his prediction that NZ would be part of Australia by 1995 - ah the folly of youth!) and using the massive grunt of my work 386SX to supplement the humble sharp at home.
Then came Cosmos (thank you Mr Naylor!) and the joys of Usenet. I remember the buzz about this hypertext WWW thing at CERN, and then Andreeson's modest posting about something called Mosaic and then the world exploded.
In 96 I was working for the IRD researching electronic commerce and other stuff when they said "we need a website - you know about this internet stuff - go build it" which was how stuff happened back then. I had 10 weeks to a) work out an architecture b) audition suppliers c) learn HTML and d) build the damn thing. A very heady time - I was dreaming in HTML by the end of it.
About the same time I got on the ISOCNZ council and was part of a revolution as we took over the management of .nz from Waikato and commercialised the NZ net. We made some mistakes but I'm pretty proud of the results on the whole. I was also chair of GOVIS and managed .govt.nz for 8 or so years.
I think the day I knew the Internet had arrived in NZ was when I saw an article in the Dominion (as was) that wasn't on the infotech pages. Ah, I thought, we're mainstream now.
30 years from punchcard to omnipresence (internet on my phone?!?) - pretty incredible really.
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Brown, you bastard. You linked to a Kiwiblog post including comments without giving a mental health warning. How will I recover?