There was a time in the early days of the new millennium when the fastest internet connection in Newcastle was running out of a music shop in the Hunter Street mall.
Soundworld, owned by Spero Davias, was one of the first Hunter franchises to be able to link its shopfronts around the city on a network of computers and the result, Mr Davias remembers, was like something out of a science fiction film.
"People would come in and say 'have you got David Bowie's album?' and the staff could look it up on the computer and say 'we're sold out, but Maitland's got two'," he said.
It is hard now to imagine how much of a profound impact the internet could have on a business in those days. But for the man who saw it coming, it was only a matter of time.
Chris Deere, the father of the internet in Newcastle and Hunter, was determined that the city would be ready for it. He founded the first internet service provider in the region, Hunterlink, in 1994 and founded the telco Ipera Communications in 2000 with a vision to bring high speed internet to Newcastle. A pioneer of the internet age, he also established the first commercial wireless network in Australia in 2002. He was a techie's techie, and a mentor to countless young professionals in the early days of the Australian internet.
But for those who knew him, it wasn't what Mr Deere did that mattered; it was how he did it, and why.
Mr Deere died of a sudden aortic dissection - a tear in the internal face of the largest artery in the heart - at Lake Macquarie Private Hospital on September 7. He was 52 years old.
"Chris was one of those rare people, someone you always learnt something from," his friend and one-time business partner James Spenceley said. "It wasn't the direct knowledge that was special, it was how he made you a better person by osmosis; by the way he approached things, by his honest curiosity, and by the way he did things."
Mr Deere was raised in Sydney, and moved to Hunter in 1989 where he started studying information technology at the University of Newcastle. He took his study at "a leisurely pace", he told the Newcastle Herald in 2013; it took him six years to complete the degree but in the same time, he founded the region's first dial-up internet service provider.
Six telephone lines coming in that provided a shared connection for users to access the earliest days of the web.
"I used to dial into his internet from home at Bar Beach," Mr Davias remembered this week. "Then jump in the car and drive down to Hunter Street in Newcastle West and watch my modem try to negotiate onto the internet. It was first in, best dressed.
"It was a cool sort of atmosphere," Mr Davias said, "A little Google."
In the years that followed, Mr Deere would go on to sell his service provider, Hunterlink, and plough much of the funding into installing a loop of fibre optic cable along Hunter and King streets aimed at revolutionising the city's connection. But beneath all that he achieved as an entrepreneur and pioneer of the city's early internet, there was a simple philosophy that rings through the remembrances of countless friends this week.
"Chris was one of those people that was genuinely driven to make a difference and challenge the status quo," NIB chief information officer Brendan Mills said. "People worked for Chris because they loved the environment he created, and he helped build and shape the careers of so many."
"Unlike most people, and especially nowadays who are driven to start a business to be an entrepreneur or to make money, for Chris that part was a byproduct, he was driven to use technology to make lives and businesses better," Mr Spenceley said.
At home, he was dedicated to his family and turned his hand to building his sustainable dream smart home on Lake Macquarie, completed in 2021.
While his legacy is invisible, his influence is everywhere.
"Having been in the subfloor of the Soundworld store many years after it had closed, the most outdated looking Ipera fibre was still in situ," Mr Deere's friend Nick Brown said. "And it probably still is. But there is real beauty in that. We are telling Chris' story, but what he built in Ipera helped so many iconic Newcastle businesses tell theirs."
Mr Deere is survived by his partner, Penny, and his two children Thomas and Louisa. The family will held a private funeral on Monday, September 18, and a celebration of Mr Deere's life held on Sunday, October 29.
As friends and former colleagues joined to share their memories of Mr Deere, and established the memorial website, 'CelebratingChris', one telling anecdote, shared by a former colleague, Matthew Tangye, in the days after hearing of Mr Deere's death, seemed a fitting testament to his legacy.
"One day, when we worked together at HelpKey in the mid-90s, (Mr Deere) said to me, "Matt, I think I'm going to leave HelpKey and set up the internet in Newcastle"," Mr Tangye recalled.
"I replied: "What's the internet?",
"Chris said, "I don't know, but I think it could be a big thing"."
