Mike made things happen

Mike Lawrie looked at me and said: "We could conceivably run networking cable up there, but I'm not sure it would work over those distances and it would be very expensive."

It was 1989, at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. I was a lowly English and journalism student wanting to connect my computer to the campus network.

This week I remembered that conversation I had with the guy from the computer lab who was, frankly, a bit stunned at my impertinence.

Lawrie, the unassuming geek I had spoken to, is now a legendary figure in the history of the internet in South Africa, which celebrated its 20th anniversary on Saturday.

Years later I met him when I was involved with the Mail & Guardian website.

I remembered him instantly, but never let on that I was the lazy student who wanted to wire up his own computer.

You see, the English department had set this bizarre computer-based assignment and we had to sit in the cramped, cranky lab and do the work on those green-hued screens that gave you slight migraines and made everything yellow for two hours afterwards.

I had hoped to work in my residence room instead, as well as do other typing work.

It was an unusual request, especially because it was 1989. First-year journalism students still had to learn to type on old manual typewriters. B Journ was the only university course at the time that required touch-typing as a mandatory skill.

My computer at the time was one of the legendary Apple Macintosh all-in-ones. It still had its full name, and it could run all of three programs at a time. It's the one Steve Jobs is seen cradling on the back of Walter Isaacson's biography, which I, like everyone else it seems, am busy reading.

Not knowing how, or even if, I would be able to use it at Rhodes, I had left my Mac at home in Joburg. When I got back, I discovered my mother had sold it. "You never used it," she said by way of reason, even as I tried to explain I lived halfway across the country at the time.

These old Macintoshes are collector's items now, much like the typewriters and surely all of those now rudimentary computers used to make those first internet data connections 20 years ago.

By my final years, the typewriters had been replaced with computer keyboards and we were already learning layout using a package called Quark, which was about as complicated as early internet tie-ups.

I heard about how Lawrie made the first data transfer on November 12 1991 and I went to the computer lab out of curiosity. It was still a poor cousin to other academic pursuits such as science, literature, geology, and drinking. Computer science was hardly in its infancy, but the geeks had yet to inherit the earth - and the corporate budgets. (TechCentral has a lovely story on this historic event and Lawrie's role: http://j.mp/vZYZ8i).

Lawrie, a humble but determined man, was able to circumvent, not only all the technical difficulties, but also South Africa's pariah status to get a data connection with the University of Delaware.

The first email reads: "Well, the line keeps going up and down, and the 'telcos' have not completed testing yet. But for the record, it was the first ping from North America to [sub-Saharan] Africa."

It's hard to imagine a life without internet or e-mail and it's thanks to pioneers like Mike Lawrie that we have it in South Africa.

• Shapshak is editor of Stuff magazine