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 ...