[afnog] Remembering apb (was: In Memoriam: Alan Barrett

[Seun Ojedeji]

Thanks for sharing this rare history Randy. May his soul continue to rest
in peace.

Regards

----
Sent from my mobile
kindly excuse typos

On Thu, 28 May 2026, 2:12 pm Randy Bush, <randy at psg.com> wrote:

> Date: Thu, 28 May 2026 08:24:58 -0700
> From: Randy Bush <randy at psg.com>
> To: Mirjam Kuehne <mir at zu-hause.nl>
> CC: ripe-list at ripe.net
> Subject: [ripe-list] Re: In memoriam: Alan Barrett
>
> [ because most folk do not know ]
>
> Alan was an early developer and promoter of the network in Southern
> Africa.  He was the system administrator at the University of Natal in
> Durban when the first IP connections came into South Africa at the end
> of the '80s.  He was part of the original triangle for TCP/IP, UND,
> University of Cape Town, and the hub, Rhodes university.  I once visited
> him in Durban; but to be honest, all I remember is the jacaranda and my
> first introduction to KwaZulu culture.
>
> In 1991 RAINet (Portland) had an advertising agency as a customer and
> they had a growing rack of Macintoshs serving their customers' web
> sites.  Alan hacked NetScape to listen on in_addr(any).  He wrote it up
> as a paper for INET '92 in Kobe.  The rest is history.  [ for the non
> geeks, this hack is at the core of Apache and other multi-site web
> servers ]
>
> Alan, Chris Pinkham[0], and Paul Nash[1] went on to form the first
> African commercial ISP, TICSA, which was quite successful.  Then on to
> lead Cequrux, a software house which developed an enterprise security
> appliance.
>
> From there to AfNOG, AfriNIC, and the stories most folk know.
>
> He was a gentle soul.  We miss you, Alan.
>
> ---
>
> [0] Who went on to develop EC2, the first cloud, and now sails the
>     world with Christine
>
> [1] Who died fron a series of strokes a few years back in Toronto :(
>
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