Shebang: You were up to this form the age of twelve... Were you good at maths. - good at school?

Soggie: Yes At that time I was first in school for every subject

Shebang: every subject and then you got interested in computers and it all went down the pan

Soggie: Well, languages didn’t really interest me that much Some other stuff you did at that time or later.

Shebang: You started to get a proper job what when you were about sixteen or a little older- ?

Soggie: I did some summer jobs then but I only started to work on a part-time contract when I was twenty I think

Shebang: And when you were doing your summer jobs they must have said this guy’s absolutely brilliant will you come and work with us full-time when you finish school.

Soggie: Yes in most cases they were very happy with me. But I did two summer jobs. One was with a company that dealt with waste management. What I did there was to programme the control for a robot which would clean carbo-electrical power plants. They had huge turbines which had to be cleaned because they were completely stuck because of the exhaust fumes from the coal and oil ovens. It had to be cleaned as fast as possible because they had to turn off the power plant in order to do that and every day you have to turn off the power plant you can’t produce anything it costs several millions in whatever t currency you want and by having that cleaning process - before it took them 3 days to clean that turbine - and by them having it alternated it only took one day and a half and so they gained several extra million Belgian francs every time they got a job because they could now do it automatically.

Shebang: Wow. But how did you get your vast reputation. People want to kiss your feet. You are a legend. How did you acquire that aura? For being a computer guru. Just for saving them money?

Soggie: When I was at the university I was finally going to have internet access because I was at the university. I was really looking forward to it. You have to realise t that time nobody knew what you were talking about when you mentioned the internet. We knew that it was going to be important but the rest of the world just didn’t seem to realise it. It ‘s not as if the government at that time was actively promoting internet access for everyone. Like here in Belgium now it’s one of the targets,or one of the priorities of the government that everyone should have an internet connection. That was also my goal a couple of years ago. But at that time if you went to talk to politicians or whatever they looked at you and moved on with a strange face . Also the university I went to was rather large, they had about 25,000 students, and about 15,000 staff so quite a big organisation but even there almost nobody had access to the internet even though the university had an internet connection. In fact there were only ten students out of that 25,000 students who were allowed to use the internet. There were of course some postgraduate students and professors so forth. But, well, officially it was just a few students, and then I managed to get into that group of ten, who were allowed internet access. It was actually some small group of people whom the system administrator wanted to test out certain new features they had installed and they needed some experienced users to play with them. That was the only way you could get internet access without studying a couple of years before you could reach the necessary status. At that time also my view was also was that I really wanted to have internet access in my room. I had heard that at some American universities that was possible in that they had dormitories and they simply had the megabyte internet connection in every room and I also wanted that. The University didn’t have the money in the beginning to set up such a thing so with some other people in our dormitory I started up an organisation to do exactly that. And we first set up our own network within the dormitory. We tried to convince the university to give us a connection to their network so we could get on the internet. And after a year or two that did work out and we got some initial trials but even before we already had a connection to the interne. The only problem was that it was using Sneakernet that basically meant that once or twice a day people had to go over to the university’s computer labs with all the outbound mail and then they would put it in the machine there and then they would retrieve all the inbound emails and then by physically moving from the dormitory to the university centre everybody in the dormitory could get their email.

But it still meant that you could send a message to the United States for free in less than twenty-four hours. O.K. it was not at internet speed but it was still an interesting thing.

And then the next year there was a new Rector at the University. That was someone who came from the electro-technical department, and he liked that idea more. He was more familiar with ineternet technology. The former Rector came from the human sciences. I think he was a social scientist or whatever -

Shebang: [LAUGHING] Yukk

Soggie: And he wasn’t that interested in it. And then they made wiring student dormitories a priority for the university and then they came up with a lot of cash to finance wiring all the buildings that the university owned plus the private dormitories. And I was involved in the set-up of that entire network. And, well, a lot of students at the university profited from that . They might know that we initiated it.