[ 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 :(