North Malaysia Internet User Group

Over lunch yesterday, I was talking with a colleague about the good old Internet days, long before TMNet came into the picture. Before TMNet, there was JARING, and while JARING still exists today, their services are now totally overshadowed by TMNet's Streamyx. But way back in the mid-1990s, JARING was the main window to cyberspace. At that time, the use of cyberspace was mainly confined to emails, mailing lists, newsgroups, file transfer protocol, gopher and telnet. Surfing the world wide web came later.

I cannot recall when exactly I had my JARING account. It could have been in 1992 or 1993. In those days, it was so difficult to even sign up to JARING. In the application form, I had to give reasons why I needed an account and I had to ask my senior manager at Ban Hin Lee Bank to confirm that I was a staff there. You can imagine the questions I was asked when an inquisitive and suspicious manager wanted to know what JARING was and why I needed it. Today, as long as you can afford to pay, you don't need to ask anyone's approval to get an Internet connection.

The cyberspace community in those days was very small and closely knitted. Almost everyone in the community in Penang knew one another. Somehow, when a new JARING member came on board, we would know. In 1994, we decided to have a first face-to-face meeting at the YMCA. We called ourselves members of the North Malaysia Internet User Group although I can't understand why we adopted the acronym NOMIS instead of NOMIG.

Anyway, it made no difference to the people in the user group. We agreed to hold regular meetings to exchange ideas and more often than not, we used the facilities at the Universiti Sains Malaysia to get connected to their "always on" 64kbps line and surf. In those days, a 64kbps line was a Big Thing for us dial-up users to get excited about.

I'm writing this because my colleague and I were wondering where all the NOMIS people have gone. Through time, the NOMIS group dispersed once the Internet became more popular, commercialised and accessible. But in my office today, I can still count on Mark Chang, Ted Targosz and Teoh Eng Soon in my NOMIS fellowship ring.

The ones that I still keep in touch with are Jeffrey Chew, Palaniappan, Andy Yeoh, Eddy Lim and Nanis. Once in a long while, I still bump into NK Lim, Hans Choong and two of my old pals, Lim Kean Chuan and Tan Wooi Tong. But as for people like Gerald Tan, Goh Swee Hem and a host of many others, I wonder where they are now.

[UPDATE: Ted suggested that NOMIS could mean the North Malaysia Internet Society. That may be correct but I would still dispute the use of the word "society" as it implies a properly constituted and registered body which we were not.]