Rise and rise OF THE INTERNET

In 1991, only 1200 Kiwis had the internet. Now more than 90 per cent of us do. Joel MacManus looks at how the country turned digital.

In a ‘‘miserable, cold, draughty’’ cellar at Cambridge University, a 23-year-old Ernest Rutherford sent a series of wireless radio waves to a magnetic detector 20 metres away.

Rutherford’s 1893 invention was a crude precursor to the wireless telegram, which would be perfected just months later.

It was the first form of wireless communication that could be transmitted over distance, and in some senses, a very early link on the complicated chain of scientific discoveries that would eventually lead to the internet.

The first computer to make its way to New Zealand’s shores was an IBM 650, bought by the DSIR in 1961. It weighed 2700 kilograms.

Eight years later, the first internet connection was created.

A message was sent from a computer at the UCLA campus to one in Stanford on October 29, 1969. It was meant to be one word: LOGIN. Those five letters proved too much for the primitive network. The Stanford computer received the first two letters only: LO. The first word ever sent over the internet was a typo.

Waikato University established New Zealand’s first connection to the internet in 1989.

At a 2014 ceremony marking the achievement, John Houlket remembered the shaky start. He spent a Sunday on the phone to Hawaii trying to establish the link but had to dismantle and reconfigure the modem.

‘‘I had to move a chip and all I had was a screwdriver. You never [use] a screwdriver. If I’d broken that chip, it would have been weeks before we could have got a new one,’’ he says. ‘‘Thankfully it worked.’’

The initial connection ran at 9.6kb per second. At that speed, a 1GB movie file would take 240 hours to download.

The World Wide Web was created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, and by the next year, there were 1193 internet users in the country. Possibly the first website in New Zealand was a directory of contacts for Victoria University, launched in 1993.

In 1995, Wellington mayoral candidate Stephen Rainbow became the first person to run a political campaign using a website. He finished seventh but won a spot on the council.

The same year, Prime Minister Jim Bolger ceremoniously launched New Zealand’s first online newspaper, InfoTech Weekly, noting that while the demise of newspapers had long been predicted, ‘‘until someone finds a way to wrap fish ’n’ chips with electronic bits and bytes, then papers will stay with us, operating alongside . . . the internet’’.

It made national news that year when the Wellington Gliding Club bought a plane online, paying $42,000 to import the aircraft from Germany – one of the largest online purchases in New Zealand at the time.

The average internet user in New Zealand was a single, white male, aged 31 with an uppermiddle class income, likely to work in IT or academia.

Andrew Cushen, of Internet NZ, remembers first getting online in 1994. His family signed up for CompuServe through their home PC, paying $5 an hour for dial-up internet.

‘‘In the 90s, people were mostly using it for academic purposes but there was a lot of connection and discussion. It was the era of the bulletin board and the chatroom.’’

The first wave of internet giants launched in the late 1990s – with exponential growth in users – including Amazon, Google and local startup Trade Me.

There were already concerns popping up about the way it was taking over our lives. A study of Australian teens warned a third of respondents were becoming ‘‘psychologically addicted’’ to the internet and spent an average of 13 hours a week online. In 2019, that number was 7 hours a day – or 49 hours per week.

Despite the rapid boom, there was an increasingly strong narrative that the internet was nearing a time of reckoning – partly driven by the dot com bubble bursting and several highprofile online business failures.

Articles in The Dominion warned it may be ‘‘no more than a passing fad’’, as some United Kingdom studies found online hours declining. That wasn’t shown to be the case in New Zealand but there was a noticeable change in the way we used the internet, moving from novelty to it being part of our every day lives.

‘‘Surfing on the internet is a fad and it’s a trend that will decline as the novelty wears off. Most of us are past that phase. But to say that the internet itself is a fad is missing the mark,’’ Massey

University professor Dennis Viehland said at the time in The Evening Post.

When Stuff.co.nz launched on June 27, 2000, 47.4 per cent of the country had access to the internet through home, work or school.

INL managing director Mike Robson said the goal was to get Stuff.co.nz into the top 10 sites visited in New Zealand.

It’s well and truly there, now the most-popular homegrown site, according to Nielsen Online Ratings. Kiwis visit Stuff more than any individual site other than Google, Facebook, YouTube and Microsoft.

Stuff wasn’t the first major online news site in New Zealand.

Since 1998, nzherald.co.nz had been live, and the TVNZ venture nzoom.co.nz, the online home of One News content, had been growing in popularity.

The oldest online news source in the world appears to be Bloomberg, which launched in 1993 as a financial markets portal.

MIT student newspaper The Tech claims to be the first news organisation to deliver articles over the internet.

Most of the top websites when Stuff launched would barely be recognisable to today’s kids. The top 10 most visited sites in 1999 were: AOL, Yahoo!, Geocities, MSN, Netscape, Excite, LYCOS, Microsoft, Amer and Infoseek.

Most of those no longer exist. AOL was bought out by Yahoo! in 2015, Geocities was switched off last year, and Infoseek was shut down by Disney in 2001, just three years after buying the website for $770 million.

The 2000s saw the arrival of ‘‘Web 2.0’’ sites that emphasised user-generated content. The movement led to the formation of YouTube, Facebook, along with social networks that have now fallen by the wayside, such MySpace, LiveJournal and Bebo.

More than 600,000 New Zealanders used Bebo, which was the largest social media site here before Facebook crushed all the competition.

The Web 2.0 revolution meant more interactive features and more content-rich experiences but required a lot more bandwidth. However, internet speeds were dropping below the rest of the world and were considered to be overpriced, with many accusing Telecom of anticompetitive practises.

That led to government legislation in 2006 requiring Telecom to open up its network for other companies to operate on, and in 2008 the company was split into three, with network access separated from the wholesale and retail units.

‘‘It meant internet connectivity was no longer as expensive . . . It was no longer the preserve of the few. It was far more of a mass-market proposition,’’ Cushen said.

By 2010, 83 per cent of New Zealanders were online, and there were 1.2 million broadband subscribers. There are now more than 80 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) operating in New Zealand.

The 2010s marked the era of Facebook and saw the rise of personalisation, Cushen said. Facebook allowed university students in New Zealand to join in December 2005, and by September 2006 it opened to the public. By 2012, it had 2.7 million unique users a month in New Zealand.

‘‘ISPs have the ability to know more about us and therefore be able to recommend and customise and suit their services to our requirements but, on the flipside, they hold more and more data about us,’’ Cushen said.

Nearly 90 per cent of Kiwis are at least somewhat concerned about the security of personal information online, Internet NZ’s latest insights report found.

However, 90 per cent of Kiwis said the positives of the internet outweighed the negatives.

The ability to work from home is consistently one of the topranked benefits of the internet. The 2019 survey had 59 per cent of people list it as one of their top three benefits. With Covid-19, Cushen is watching the 2020 report closely for a shift in that.

‘‘We’re rethinking what the modern office looks like. That could be a great thing. But it does raise new challenges and concerns about security.’’

Most Kiwis now have at least three internet-connected devices, but it still hasn’t reached everyone: about 7 per cent of New Zealand have no internet access.

‘‘Seven per cent doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s 350,000 people. It’s a lot of New Zealanders at risk of being excluded online. That’s not just an infrastructure issue, it’s about building skills, motivation and understanding.’’

Looking forward, Cushen sees even more rapid advancements in internet access for New Zealand.

‘‘I don’t think many New Zealanders realise just how good we’ve got it. Right now, 70 per cent of households have fibre, and that’s going to go up to 87 in the next couple of years, which means speeds of up to 4 gigabit.

‘‘That will be incredibly transformative in terms of what New Zealanders can do online, and I feel like we’re only just scratching the surface.’’

‘‘We’re rethinking what the modern office looks like. That could be a great thing. But it does raise new challenges and concerns about security.’’

Andrew Cushen