Thank you for sharing this. I was born in ‘95—hearing a firsthand account of the early internet in Australia from someone that helped to bring it here is truly special.
I was on the software side; mostly authentication & billing, stuff we had to write ourselves because noone else was doing it at the time.
If you want to understand how it felt, the current wave of generative AI systems feels a lot like those pioneering dialup days. Like the internet, that stuff looks like it's going to change the world - both more slowly than we expect, at first, and then more completely than we can imagine today. It's unbelievable to me that we have high speed internet in our pockets, when I used to dream of having a 1Mb wired connection to my computer.