[ih] Fwd: [nznog] Internet pioneer David Dix has passd away

[Brian E Carpenter]

This obit documents an interesting slice of the early
years of international growth.

     Brian

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: [nznog] Internet pioneer David Dix has passd away
Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2025 18:58:05 +1300
From: Richard Haakma via NZNOG <nznog at lists.nznog.org>
Reply-To: Richard Haakma <richard at kci.net.nz>
To: nznog at lists.nznog.org

Hi all.

New Zealand Internet pioneer David Dix has passed away today, the 22nd
of February 2025.

David was the founder and owner of the KCBBS bulletin board system and
KC Internet Company in the late 1980s.

KC stands for Kappa Crucis, which is the tenth brightest object in the
Southern Cross constellation, actually a star cluster also called the
"Jewel Box" and came from David's other hobby, astronomy. David was
involved with the Auckland Observatory and could get you a good deal on
a telescope.

KCBBS was built on 386BSD Unix which was a natural choice as the Unix
operating system already had drivers for serial ports and multitasking
which meant that it could support more than one user simultaneously.
This was at a time when conventional BBS's running on MS-DOS supported
one user only. Later the BBS was upgraded to a Sun workstation running
SunOS.

David wrote the BBS code himself in the C computer language.
Unfortunately I believe the code was lost some years ago.

The early Internet came to New Zealand via Waikato University and made
its way to Auckland University, where KC first got a connection at 2400
bps. This was soon upgraded to 9600bps when David and friends
discovered how to modify an asynchronous PC serial port to work on a
synchronous data circuit.

Curious KCBBS users could start to use email, but this was before
hypertext and HTTP websites came in to use.
Upgrades in speed and the change to actual router hardware, which was
DEC hardware using licensed Cisco firmware, meant that the costs were
growing. KC Internet was started to provide internet access to a few of
David's mates in tech businesses for a fee to cover the budget. More
customers were found and KC Internet became a commercial internet
provider.

Users of the KCBBS BBS program continued to use it for free.
KC dropped the connection to Auckland University and became directly
connected to Waikato University. When the universities wanted to get
out of the chain of commercial internet activity the international
service was handed over to a branch of Telecom and KC Internet became a
customer of Telecom.

David became interested in solar and wind power so installed a wind
turbine and solar system which was large enough to run the ISP
equipment 24/7 and no mains power. For a time KC Internet was the
greenest ISP in New Zealand. The mains power would go off all up and
down the street and David's place still had the lights on, making his
neighbours curious. This was around the time of the great electricity
crisis of Auckland CBD and KC internet was not affected.

Getting data services installed to David's suburban basement became a
problem and the core was moved to the CBD and away from the solar
system, which meant that KC Internet was no longer the greenest ISP.

Eventually health problems meant that David needed to step back from KC
Internet and David had a quieter life and continued to benefit from
that solar power system at home which is still working now.

David passed away comfortably in North Shore Hospital.

Regards,
RH.

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