Sam Varghese
Monday, 14 January 2008 21:34
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 6
When Kim Hawtin, like many other young Australians, went to London in 2000 to work. he never knew that he would be introduced to one of the abiding interests of his life while there. Then in his late 20s, he had gone over to the mother country after graduation. While there he got involved with Consume.net, a group aiming to build up community wireless networks.
Hawtin, who now works with the University of Adelaide as a systems administrator, says: "I spent a lot of time at dek.spc, a workshop/lab hosted by James Stevens, one of the founders of Consume.net. There I met a great many folks into community wireless, radio, networking and FLOSS. James really planted the seed of community wireless for me. Julien Preist, co-founder of Consume.net was a technical guy and pointed me in the right directions early on, on the hardware front."
At the forthcoming Australian national Linux conference Hawtin will be running a miniconf on just this topic - community wireless.
But we are getting a little bit ahead of ourselves here; Hawtin had set the foundation for a technical career by his pursuits during the tender years of life. As a child, he was into Lego, learning to explain concepts by building things.
Then came basic electronics ("Dick Smith kits are fantastic!" he says), a BBS at school followed by a vz200 and basic programming at home. These aren't activities in which an average child would indulge.
As a teenager, Hawtin discovered Pascal and learnt assembly language soon after he got his first PC in 1991; he used his newly acquired skills for crunching numbers for his high school mathematics course.
Hence, it was not surprising that he opted to study computer science when he made his way to university. Two years after the GNU/Linux operating system was first released, Hawtin started messing around with it. He taught himself the C programming language and started porting applications to this new toy.
In 1994, at the age of 20, he founded the first of a couple of Linux user groups - the University of Queensland Linux Users Group. Two years later, he repeated the act in Toowomba and the Toowomba Home Unix Users Group was born. In between he wrote his own interpreter and then a compiler and provided support on IRC and newsgroups, also doing some work on the X Windows code.
