Hi.
David's ashes will be scattered at Eucalyptus Grove Waikumete Cemetery
at 11am 27 February, which is tomorrow.
Regards,
RH.
On Tue, 2025-02-25 at 12:41 +0000, Stephen wrote:
> Hi Richard,
>
> My condolences, is there a service planned?
>
> I did not know David personally, but have known of him for nearly 30
> years now.
>
> Thanks
>
> Stephen
>
>
> On Saturday, February 22nd, 2025 at 6:58 PM, Richard Haakma via NZNOG
> <nznog(a)lists.nznog.org> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > 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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