[LINK] Future of the Internet in Australia

[Tom Koltai]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: link-bounces at mailman1.anu.edu.au 
> [mailto:link-bounces at mailman1.anu.edu.au] On Behalf Of Ivan Trundle
> Sent: Tuesday, 27 July 2010 11:35 AM
> To: Link list
> Subject: Re: [LINK] Future of the Internet in Australia
> 
> On 27/07/2010, at 9:54 AM, Tom Worthington wrote:
> 
> > Uniquely, Tom Worthington was selected to explain what the Internet 
> > was to the Australian Senate
> 
> That's a relief. Someone had to do it, and I'm glad it wasn't 
> me. I only had to explain it to the Governor-General. And my mum.


Damn. Why does everyone else get the easy jobs...?

I had to explain it to the whole of Australia....

(via the magazines: Chips 'n Bits and Internet Australasia) Two
!quality! Koltai publications
That wasn't the hard bit though.....

The hard bit was that Chips 'n bits was also published via FIDO
[Chips_n_Bits echo] globally and users from countries all over the world
wanted to know when we were going to start publishing in their languages
in their countries...

My standard answer [in 1993] was of course,

"We are publishing, digitally, globally, now in the language of the
business of the Internet".

I wonder if that qualifies me for having one of the worlds first Blogs.
??? (I refer to the monthly editorial, Koltai's Konundrum.)

I also tried to explain to my mum what I did in 1994. I brought a
computer for her with a dot matrix printer. I realised that I had failed
in my mission a few months later when she asked me to buy her a new
ribbon for her thirty year old portable typewriter. 

I succeeded with my father, yet it took from 1986 to 2003 to convince
him to buy a computer so that we could email each other instead of using
snail mail.

The clincher was  a phone conversation where I told dad...

"Yes dad, I speak to my nieces [his granddaughters] a couple of times
per week by email or Internet chat or Skype. Quite often we turn on the
web cams and I get to see them and the dog and off course their mother
[my sister]" (They lived in Champlagne, NY and dad lived in Wellington
New Zealand).

He purchased a computer the next day.