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Articles and Stories 2009
Around Town
An Interview with Anthony (Tony) Colleraine
owner of SanFelipe.com.mx and President of IISFAC / The Net
by
Anita Net
© 1997-2009 IISFAC
Originally from England, Dr. Anthony Colleraine came down to San Felipe in 1975, looking for a place to escape from the bustle of his home in big-city San Diego, and a reprieve from his concentrated work as a nuclear physicist with General Atomics. Upon his discovery of this little Baja town, he immediately took a liking to it, and when he returned, years later, he took on the project of making Internet services available in San Felipe. In 1997, he opened The Net, a business dedicated to providing opportunities to people, especially students in San Felipe, who were interested in learning about computers and the Internet. Not long after, The Net started the official website of San Felipe, www.sanfelipe.com.mx.
~~~
We settle into the seats at Rosita’s Restaurant, a brisk sea breeze ruffling the leaves of the ficus tree next to our table. Tony pauses to order a margarita and shrimp cocktail from the attending waitress, while I organize my notes, and then we begin the interview.
First things first, how did you find San Felipe?
“When I first moved to California, in the mid-1970s, I had some English friends there, who one day proposed that we go to San Felipe for the Fourth of July weekend. So we ended up driving down in a huge Lincoln Continental…and we had quite the adventure coming down; there was a flat tire, and such, but we eventually made it to San Felipe.” It was a long weekend, so they spent 5 days camped directly on the beach between the two mountains, Cerro al Machorro and Cerro Kila. “I’d never experienced anything like it. We sat around the campfire and told stories. It was intensely hot; we didn’t even have a tent. There was no one around; we caught fish to cook over the campfire…”, Tony pauses and grins, remembering, “And at night as the fire would start to die down, we started to see all of these little points of light around us, and as it got darker, these lights would get closer and closer, and they turned out to be these very small mice, but with very big ears, who were after our Fritos.” He chuckles at the memory. “So I fell in love with San Felipe, though I didn’t come back for years.”
What brought you back to San Felipe?
“I came back to San Felipe in 1979, with an English family who lived in San Diego with their two kids. They had asked me where was a good place to take a trip; they wanted to go somewhere different.” They had never been to Mexico, and at that point, Tony remembered San Felipe, the quaint, unique town he had visited years ago. He suggested that they go there, and so shortly after, they ventured down.
“The first night we were there we stayed at Arnold’s Motel, which was where the Rockodile is now. Things were quite different from how they are now. At that time there were only 2 or 3 telephones in town...only a couple of the streets were paved, the harbor didn’t exist…all of the buildings along the MalÈcon were different than they are today; they were built with big arched doorways, like the ones on Ave. Mar de Cortez, and it was very nice as they provided a lot of shade; they have all been knocked down since. But it was an interesting town.”
After that trip, he didn’t visit San Felipe again for about four years.
“At that time I was working intensively on nuclear fusion in San Diego; thinking about power sources for the future. But it would get difficult in San Diego with all of the hubbub going on all around. So I began to come to San Felipe. Once a month I would come down, and the Castel Hotel, what is Las Misiones Hotel now, kept me a room, #610, I believe it was, looking over the beach. So I would stay in San Felipe, do work, walk, think, drink, write proposals, and then I would go back to San Diego. It was very secluded. If you were trying to make a telephone call to San Diego, would take 4 or 5 hours to connect, and phone calls to San Felipe were pretty well impossible…. I got to like the environment. And because I was down here so often, I thought, I may as well get a house. I took a drive down the road south, which was fairly primitive at that time, and found a new development where I bought a lot, and in 1985 began building a house.”
You basically brought Internet to San Felipe; how did that happen?
“I was looking at retiring early, and I decided that I could continue to work down here as long as I had a telephone and Internet connection, but unfortunately, those didn’t exist here then. At the time, my company was working on designs for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, which meant that email and an Internet connection were now essential. I went to discuss the matter with our telephone company, Telnor, but they said no, they couldn’t do it. So then I talked with some friends of mine; one who was a scientist at CETYS University in Mexicali, and another who was a Telnor engineer. We decided that, collaborating with Telnor, we would put on a demonstration of how to get Internet working in San Felipe. We announced that there was to be an ‘Internet weekend’.” This was in April 1996. Nepo Rodriguez, whose family owned the El Cortez Hotel, let them use an empty building beside the hotel. The building later became the Net; it was originally a little tourist bar called “The Deadly Viper”. CETYS University brought down routers and the necessary technical equipment, while Telnor installed the telephone lines, and they spent Friday setting up 10 computers in the building.
“It was the biggest technical event San Felipe had seen at that time. On Saturday we opened from 8:00 AM until 9:00 PM, and we were mobbed. There were lines of 30-40 people at a time, waiting to get in. About 2,000 people showed up over that weekend. We had the CETYS people in the back manning the routers, and Telnor set up an info booth outside. There were a lot of retired Americans coming in, asking, “What is Internet?” And when the weekend was over, CETYS and Telnor offered to just leave the equipment hooked up, and that was when the Net was born. We set up a non-profit organization, and started providing memberships for dial-up Internet. There was nothing else in town like it. Later, when it became clear that there was a strong demand for Internet services, Telnor brought in 10,000 telephone lines, but for a while we were the only place that offered Internet service.”
What about www.sanfelipe.com.mx ? How did San Felipe’s official website get started?
“Our first web page went up in January 1997. It was built by Nico Reed, a thirteen-year-old boy who had come down to San Felipe with his parents. The Net really started up as a place to offer an opportunity for young students in San Felipe to learn skills in web design and management and key computer skills. In the early years, we had a stream of people coming through all day just to fiddle around on this new concept called the Internet, see what it was all about and how they could use it in their lives and businesses. We didn’t really go in with a business frame of mind.” The website has evolved over the years into a slew of useful information about the town, and established itself as an invaluable resource for the town. As of now, there are some 4000 pages of data and 10,000 photos of San Felipe that we will one day get organized…
“So the whole thing really started because I needed an Internet connection to work in San Felipe, and it just grew from there.” Tony sits back and laces his fingers together, reminiscent...
For more information on Tony Colleraine, and the Net’s beginning, see the following articles:
http://www.planeta.com/ecotravel/period/belejack2.html
http://articles.latimes.com/2001/mar/01/news/tt-31596
http://www.laplaza.org/about_lap/archives/cn96/collar.html
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BEK/is_9_6/ai_54760100/
© 1997-2009 IISFAC
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