I have yet to ride a Lime Scooter, but when it comes to the internet, boy was I an early and enthusiastic adopter. Back then there was just a solitary guy at Telecom responsible for keeping their internet service going from an office in Airedale St in Auckland, and there was a guy at Waikato University in charge of allocating all the .nz domain names. “Well, he can’t have speeches.co.nz,” he told my internet provider, “that's not his registered business name!”
Thanks, irritable university guy, for doing me a huge backhanded favour compelling me to go get the domain name speeches.com instead and branch out into the US market, leading to many years of prosperous trading.
In those early years, though, you would show the internet to your friends and they would look at you with a bemused expression as the dial-up modem ran squawking up and down the scale trying to secure its tenuous connection. “Why?” they would ask me. “What’s the point, exactly?”
And I would say: “I bet you before long there will be at least 10 useful things you can do on this and when that happens everyone will want one.”
Sure enough, the internet grew and grew and changed everything and fascinating thrilling momentous things happened. It also made things altogether more challenging for me and many of my friends in journalism to make a living, but that's a story for another column.
