The man who brought the internet to the country

But even then, Archie’s messaging mate found nothing strange about walking around in a pair of shorts.

“That has stuck in my mind,” Archie said.

“He said, ‘this is summer. It’s beautiful’.”

You might know Archie as the man behind Keith’s Friday at the Barooga Bowls Club.

But Archie has been getting his community connected since long before then.

After suffering an injury to his ankle and returning to work at the Cobram ANZ bank to find it wasn’t how he remembered, Archie decided, in his own words, to “get out of the rat race.”

It was the early 1980s.

Archie and a friend, Mervyn Jack, hatched a plan to arrange an IDSL - a basic internet subscriber line - from Ballarat to Cobram.

It was the first piece of data infrastructure the pair would set up.

“I said to Mervyn, what do we need to bring the internet to Cobram?” Archie said.

“The only way you could get the internet in those days was as dial-up. Everything was dial-up.”

Before long, Archie and Mervyn had set up their own internet service provider company, Country NetLink.

Archie borrowed $45,000 from the bank where he once worked, and with the help of a federal government grant, they got under way.

Initially, customers paid $6/hr for limited dial-up internet.

After a few months, the pair decided to set up a $50/month payment plan for unlimited dial-up internet.

Archie oversaw the administrative side of the business, while his colleague Mervyn looked after the technical side of things.

“It just grew and grew,” Archie said.

“It all happened so quickly.”

The new payment plan proved massively popular, and soon Archie and Mervyn had added their own computer repair shop.

An autodidact, Archie taught himself how to repair the latest and greatest in computer technology - including the first generation Apple Macs and Windows PCs.

As the new millennium approached, Archie and Mervyn enjoyed success as the world appeared to slip into chaos.

It was the time of the infamous Y2K bug, and the pair’s computer retail business was booming, thanks to customers wanting to purchase the latest computer model for fear of losing access to the internet and their saved data.

Archie remembered speaking about his idea to bring the internet to Cobram at a Rotary Club meeting around 1984.

“I remember saying to them, ‘one day, you’ll be on the internet all the time, buying your clothes and all that,” Archie said.

While they stopped short of dismissing Archie as a tin-foil hat type, very few in his audience knew what he was talking about.

Years later, Archie was proving the doubters wrong by working 16-hour days and rarely had a weekend off.

As Archie explained, something could always go wrong.

“The software system we had was good, but it could always fall over,” he said.

Time went on.

Country NetLink had marketing agents in Shepparton, Wangaratta, Albury and Echuca in its initial two years.

Archie drove a yellow Saab convertible, and considered himself pretty cool.

But before long, he saw the writing on the wall.

There were whispers that larger companies like iiNet and Telstra were looking to expand to the area.

“I knew the big boys were soon coming to Cobram,” Archie said.

So in 2002, he and Mervyn agreed to sell the business to iiNet for a price of $1 million.

Archie looked back fondly on the years and countless hours he put into his passion.

Starting their company with just four customers, Archie and Mervyn’s ISP grew to around 4500 customers at its peak.

“There we were ‘just two blokes sitting in an office upstairs’,” Archie said.

Archie was able to make friends with people from around the world, like a cold-climate-loving missionary, and many of whom he later visited in person.

Where did Archie find the inspiration to bring the internet to the country?

“I guess I saw the potential,” he said.

And sometimes that’s all that matters.