Pioneering the
Australian Web.

The 1970s: The Foundation

The journey began in the late 1970s during my Physics Degree. My first encounter with computing was with a true mainframe, a DEC PDP-10. Programming was a tactile, manual process involving card readers and clunky line editors on a terminal. To even get the machine started, one often had to manually type in a bootstrap routine. The new PDP-11, called a "mini computer," was physically much smaller but more powerful.

In my third year, that PDP-11 provided a moment of magic. It self-booted one day to reveal two games hidden on its massive 12-inch hard drive: the legendary text adventure Zork and the classic Moon Lander. Moving beyond the pure calculation of my Fortran and Pascal studies to interactive entertainment sparked a lifelong passion for technology’s vast potential.

The 1980s: Education and Entrepreneurship

My first teaching job at Rockhampton Grammar School in 1980 put me in charge of a classroom with a PDP-11 and eight terminals. After moving to Shepparton, with no official computing curriculum in Victoria, the pioneering class I taught was officially "typing" — but in reality I taught classes of up to 30 students the fundamentals of BASIC. The eight Commodore 64s I won for the school were a huge boost. Personally, I owned a BBC Micro with a far more structured BASIC.

This deep involvement in the personal-computer boom, plus work as a specialist consultant for BBC Microcomputer networks, culminated in launching my own business in 1986: Veritas Computers in Albury. The retail outlet thrived until the 'recession we had to have' in the early 1990s prompted a shift to solo consulting.

The 1990s: Pioneering the Australian Internet

Inspired by AOL, I registered OZ On Line and began hosting websites from a Compaq SystemPro 486 server over a 56k dial-up line with a dedicated IP. Before Google, we used AltaVista. Before social media, we had IRC, ICQ, and Bulletin Boards. I built early databases for real estate clients and hand-coded the first HTML pages in text editors, most notably the iconic Australian-made HotDog Editor. As business grew, the operation moved to Dragnet, an early Albury-based ISP, and connected to their T1 line. Boy, have we come a long way.

The 2000s: Evolution to Service Broker

The business evolved into a technology broker as ServiceBroker.com.au. Tools like Microsoft FrontPage made WYSIWYG editing easier, and we built solutions with ASP databases and client portals. This was also an era of recognising the value of digital real estate; the domain oze.com.au once drew a $15,000 offer (I countered with $25k, but no sale). That valuable three-letter property now powers new projects like music.oze.au.

The 2010s: Mobile Consulting and Teaching

The decade began with a memorable year in the Kimberley. In 2010, I spent 10 months at Derby District High School as the ITAS, teaching Literacy and Numeracy to 55 Year 10–12 Aboriginal students. With sporadic attendance, I had time to become the school's internal relief teacher, help with a full network upgrade, and raid the computer graveyard to return two dozen written-off computers to classrooms. This broke some rules and wasn't popular with admin once they discovered I was a system admin!

The rest of the decade was spent as a mobile consultant from a caravan, travelling Australia, following the weather for windsurfing, and taking casual maths teaching assignments. Staying connected from remote places like Ningaloo Reef was a constant challenge, as documented here.

The 2020s: Resilience, Reinvention & the AI Frontier

After settling in Mallacoota in 2018, the major bushfires of 2020 became a pivotal moment. I started Dronecraft to document the recovery. The COVID shutdown that followed lasted effectively two years; many small businesses were lost and many are still recovering. Now, with things looking up, the AI explosion has reignited that original pioneering spirit. With new domains like dixon.au, oze.au, and ozol.au secured, it feels like the 90s all over again. Exciting times ahead!