Protagonists

Below you'll find brief bios of some of the protagonists involved in bringing the Internet to South Africa, and who'll be speaking at the event.

Pat Terry

A Cambridge graduate, Professor Pat Terry is internationally known as an author of Computer Science text books. He was the 1993 recipient of the Rhodes University Vice-Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award and was a member of the International Modula-2 standardisation committee. Pat is now retired, and is a Professor Emeritus in computer science at Rhodes University.

Mike Lawrie

Mike matriculated at SACS in 1957, and then served as a computer technician with ICL. He earned his National Engineering Diploma at Cape Tech in 1961, and graduated with a B.Sc (Hons) degree in mathematics at Rhodes University in 1969. He took up the post of Computer Manager at Rhodes University in 1971, and was soon deeply involved in multi-access computer networks. He earned his Masters degree at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in 1978, in the department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. He ran the Uninet network from 1994 until its closure in 2001. He is now retired, but runs the internal ADSL network at the retirement centre where he lives in Pretoria.

In 1988 Mike led the informal team at Rhodes University that established the first Internet networking in South Africa.  From the outset, he set up Rhodes as a gateway to other African countries.  In due course, there were links to Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe. He has been a resource person at African networking conferences in Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi and Nigeria.

He has attended a number of international networking conferences, and has had active involvement at several of them.

He administered the ZA domain namespace from 1994 until 2002.

Randy Bush

A good biography for Randy Bush exists in the citation for his honorary degree.

Randy now lives in Japan.  He is still actively involved in the Internet community, and particularly in the Internet standards process.  He has co-authored a number of RFCs.

Alan Barrett

Alan Barrett holds an M.Sc.Eng. from the University of Natal, Durban (now UKZN).  In the late 1980s and early 1990s he was a lectureer in the Department of Electronic Engineering at UND.  He was a co-founder of the first commercial ISP in South Africa, TICSA, which later became UUNET Internet Africa (now Verizon).  He has been involved with several Internet-related organisations, including ISOC, AfNOG, and AfriNIC.

François Jacot-Guillarmod

Jacot studied at Rhodes, and was a member of the first Computer Science class in 1970, started by Professor Rolf Braae and Dr Howard Williams. After graduating, he worked for Armscor at Atlas Aircraft Corporation in Kempton Park,  for Anglo-Vaal at their head office in Main Street, Johannesburg, and for Infoplan, again at Atlas. At the end of 1984 he returned to Grahamstown, working for Mike Lawrie as a systems programmer on the Control Data Cyber mainframes in the Rhodes Computing Centre. In 2002 he was appointed as Director of the Rhodes IT Division.

Angus Hay

Dr Angus Hay, PrEng, CEng, MIET, MIEEE, FSAIEE, was born and educated in Johannesburg, South Africa, and has a BSc(Eng)Elec (1987) and a PhD in digital transmission (1998) from the University of the Witwatersrand.

Dr Hay joined Neotel at its inception in 2006 as employee number two, heading Strategy. He later became Chief Technology Officer, and is today responsible for Strategic Business Development. He was previously Chief Technology Officer of Transtel, the former telecommunications division of Transnet Ltd. He is a Director of the Number Portability Company (NPC), and is currently Co-Chair of the Management Committee of the West Africa Cable System (WACS).

Dr Hay was President of the South African Institute of Electrical Engineers (SAIEE) in 2010, and has served on the Council of the Institute for 6 years. He is a Fellow of the SAIEE, was chairman of its Electronics and Software committee in 2005, and received the Institute’s annual Young Achiever award 1999.

Dr Hay has written a number of papers on telecommunications, deregulation and professional mobile radio for local and international conferences and publications. He has been involved in a variety of areas of telecommunications, including mobile radio, internet, data networking, transmission, fixed-line telephony, cellular telephony and access technologies. As a postgraduate student in the early 1990s, he took part in the establishment of the Internet between academic institutions in South Africa.