Not sure if this is the right forum but the following was just posted to NZNOG:

 

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.

 

[Mod edit (MF): formatting]