I got involved with the Net around late 1993 I think. A good friend and work mate had just left the comforting embrace of ANZ to work for some company called ICONZ.

Soon after, another friend of mine from ANZ went and joined him. I was still at ANZ, but very soon after I scored a 9600 baud modem and discovered the joys of PINE, TIN, etc thanks to them. At the time there were very few of us, so you could pretty much have any email address you wanted. For the record, I was mark@central.co.nz for a long time.

I fondly remember visiting Jeremy at the Wellington ICONZ office and him showing me Mosaic over sLip. That was pretty cool, despite the horrors of tweaking connection scripts.

I ended up working for ICONZ for a couple of months in 1995 while waiting for a VISA to enter the US to work. I worked mostly out of the Wellington office with Jeremy (No.16 The Terrace), but had occasion to visit the rats nest in Auckland a few times.

The description of the facilities in Auckland is no lie.

Also contrary to the above, I actually wrote the first graphical installer for ICONZ in late 1994, at Jeremy's request, using a very early version of VB. Since I was still working for the Bank at the time, and knee deep in the Post Office integration, I didn't have a lot of time to maintain the code base, so it was eventually farmed out to a 3rd party company. Nic, I am guessing that was u? The software packages in the installer were constantly changing, so keeping the installer up to date was a nightmare.

When I was working for ICONZ I worked on a customer management / invoicing application, using the raw data that Rowan provided from the router. Nasty stuff. There were not a lot of options for storing relational data. You could drop it into btrieve or use a flat text file basically.

I never did finish that app as my VISA came thru soon after and I was off to Texas.

BTW. I just looked at the list of people in the book. Why the hell are Chris Thorpe (Toph!), Jeremy Clyma, and John Clarke not mentioned?

Must admit I am glad to see that Kim Schienburg is not mentioned. I was around when she came storming in from NY. Personally I did not like her at all. She was a stereo typical New Yorker. Arrogant, brash, loud and full of shite. Her entrance was the beginning of the end as far I was concerned.

Fun times indeed. I am fairly sure my toaster has a higher bit rate than NZ had back then.

Cheers

Mark Nash