The old boys of the internet

It was the efforts of one nervous, young programmer that brought the internet to New Zealand. Reporter Thomas Manch meets the old hands who are now traversing new digital frontiers.

It was an anxious moment when John Houlker plugged New Zealand into the internet. He can’t remember if that April day in 1989 was hot, but he does remember dripping with sweat. After years of ‘‘tortuous’’ work, disaster loomed.

The internet today is a seemingly infrastructure-less web connecting the phones in our pockets to satellites in the sky. But back in 1989, it was just a threadbare cobweb accessed by only the most exotic networkers.

Houlker, a young IT architect at the University of Waikato, was ‘‘fanatical’’ about connecting New Zealand to this nascent grid.

It began with a chance encounter. As a student, he met a visitor deeply involved in the US Department of Defence’s early work to develop the network. The developers were under enormous stress.

‘‘He was actually travelling around the world on a doctor’s prescription for a year’s holiday. He’d had sort of a breakdown while working on it.’’

The meeting became seared into his mind, he says. Moving into the university’s IT department, he tried to connect to the grid through any means – including a failed attempt to reach it via a now-defunct network in the UK.

By 1987, he was so desperate that when he was invited to a networking conference at Princeton University he went around ‘‘begging and pleading’’ for help.

It paid off. He was introduced to two Nasa scientists struggling to find someone to help connect the Nasa science internet across the Pacific.

He came home with an offer in the works. Nasa would pay for half of the circuit and supply the hardware, a $14,000 modem.

Houlker’s contact at the University of Hawaii, contracted to make the link, was afraid he would mess it up, so didn’t send a manual.

‘‘He said, ‘look it’s all set to go, don’t touch anything, just plug it in’. But it wouldn’t work, it turned out he’d misconfigured it.’’

A circuit chip needed to be moved. It was a Sunday and the usual tools were locked away.

‘‘All I had was a screwdriver, and you’re not supposed to pull chips out with a screwdriver.’’

To make matters worse, he bent a pin on the chip. The sweat was dripping from his forehead.

‘‘It had been several years of agony up to that point – on the technical front, getting the money – the whole business was torture.’’ He couldn’t wait for those tools. ‘‘I straightened the bent pin, put the chip in, switched it on, and it bloody worked.’’

Houlker has continued his bootstrapping ways since, and there are numerous tales.

He was instrumental in the first email, which was sent to Tonga; and the invention of volume charging; or billing net users for the amount of data they consume. An early experiment on wireless internet involved rigging a highgain antenna that cast a connection across Hamilton.

That was probably against regulations at the time, he says, but it worked.

He has also spent years trying to wrangle infrastructure funding. Through decades of various roles, reports, petitions and conferences – he will happily list them all – the bureaucrats just didn’t get it.

‘‘These are all scars in my brain,’’ he says.

But, credit where it’s due, the Government-funded New Zealand Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) opened in April, promising to be the first port of call for businesses and individuals experiencing cyber attack.

‘‘The scope for harm from cyber attack, and the complexity of it, is increasing exponentially. Great to see CERT finally going, but gee, there was at least a 20-year gap there.’’

Houlker is not surprised by the internet’s development, he saw the potential from the outset.

‘‘Initially people were puzzled why New Zealand’s net traffic grew so quickly. My explanation was: New Zealand is so isolated, it means more to us than others.’’

However, he hasn’t taken to all the internet’s offerings. Houlker doesn’t use social media: ‘‘too time-consuming’’.

Now an independent contractor, he continues to work at the cutting edge in homegrown start-ups developing vehicle and agricultural automation through big data. ‘‘The stuff never ends.’’

When New Zealand was first plugged in, Eric Hubbard was somewhere at the other end of the line in Silicon Valley.

A Nasa ‘‘grunt’’, or scientist, he was demanding more speed from early supercomputers as the first emails were being sent.

‘‘If you could figure out how to connect something up, somebody would give you the money to just see if you could do that. It was kind of like the wild west.’’

Now a security consultant for Hitachi Systems, Hubbard was among the 300 cyber security experts who descended upon the University of Waikato for an International Standards Organisation conference recently.

Brought into the server room where it all began, he muses about those early days in a stream of jargon. ‘‘It was huge. DNS was just coming alive . . . You guys were early.’’

Did they know what was coming?

‘‘Short answer: No. Those of us that were involved in the early, early days, we were just excited.’’

That frontier feel hasn’t left the internet’s old boys, but it has shifted. It’s pretty nasty out there, Hubbard says.

‘‘Organised crime is the one I find really, really scary. They bring all the tools they have – kidnapping, extortion – to cyberspace.’’

It’s not like they haven’t seen it coming. The Morris Worm, one of the first pieces of malware, crippled the network in 1988.

‘‘It stopped a bunch of us in our tracks. We said ‘this could be really bad’, because we had then become dependent on this infrastructure.’’ That was then, imagine now. ‘‘How dependent are you on your iPhone? If somebody said, ‘what if I just zap that?’ You’d be an unhappy camper.’’

I straightened the bent pin, put the chip in, switched it on, and it bloody worked. John Houlker, on the day he plugged New Zealand into the net