My treasured memory is the first time I was smacked for downloading too much from the 'internet', in 1985.

I had been working with the first PCs since 1982 as an MBasic programmer and got hired by Digital in 1984 to support their Rainbow PC. For $10K you got a dual-boot MS-DOS and CP/M PC with a 10MB hard drive. If you didn't pay $5K annual support you were almost guaranteed that the HDD would blow up and cost you the $5K to replace.

In between playing far too much Zork I discovered the wonderful DEC Notes discussion groups, which were for internal use only, but covered a myriad of topics. I really enjoyed the Politics group and harboured fond desires to travel to Nicaragua to support DEC systems and the revolution simultaneously - I got as far as visiting the Aeroflot offices in Auckland to find out the fare.

As well as my futile ambitions to travel to Latin America I was superficially involved in a plan to paddle protest canoes on Moruroa, to be launched from the Rainbow Warrior. One of the purposes of her last visit was supposedly to pick up the landing team in Auckland. I remember when the Rainbow Warrior was bombed (which my mate Garry, DEC's sysadmin, claimed to have heard) I posted on the DEC Politics Notes group the next day that I believed 'it was the bastard French'. I was quite pleased to be proved right some time later.

About that time I also discovered DEC's gateways into the ARPAnet and went looking for more games. I downloaded quite a few (which I don't think I ever played) over DEC NZ's satellite link through Fiji, before Garry came looking for whoever had wasted 5MB of the company's precious bandwidth.

I left DEC soon after (in disgust at their lack of appreciation for what PCs could do) to try to bring IT to broadcasting , and am still trying to do the same.