It's the Autumn of 1995, and after about six mostly-rubbish months working for a small software company in Ipswich (doing nothing but tedious bug fixing on Pick-based printing-company systems), Nosher lands a job at the corporate IT department of Suffolk County Council, known as CISU. The first few tasks revolve around supporting the Chief Exec's laptop (the inestimable Peter Bye) and installing new Windows 95 systems. After a month or so, a new project comes along which is to help out doing some new-fangled "web pages" for SCC's fledgeling site - one of only a handful of UK government websites around, and one of only about 25,000 websites in total, on the whole World Wide Web

It's hard to think now just how insanely cool it was doing something that was so cutting-edge, a year or two before it became properly "mainstream". Documentaries like Channel 4's "Visions of Heaven and Hell", broadcast in February 1995, had already set the scene and, by around 1997, even some TV programmes started including URLs in their credits. And we'd been there already! The SCC website went on to win several awards, including the Society of Public Information Networks' top award in 1998, and the Local Government Association Website of the Year in 1999. It had several TV and lots of press appearances - Nosher was in a few of these and even got spotted by the regulars up the pub on the local news. We also provided internet access for most of the Ipswich campus, including Libraries, initially over nothing more than a 64k leased line (which was eventually upgraded to 2mbps around 1998). There were also partnerships with other local governments like that of West Flanders in Bruges, Belgium; working with and publishing interesting content from the Suffolk Record Office (including Suffolk's oldest document, the 11th Century Charter of Eye); publishing photos and x-rays from the Archaeology department's "Saxon Horse" dig; a Suffolk-wide partnership of local authorities and even a ride on the Euro gravy train to Rome, courtesy of a project called "Gala".

Unfortunately, I.T. in local government is very much the political football and a change in administration plus a new Chief Executive heralded the inevitable outsourcing of IT. Nosher left in 2000, before this happened, to join a tiny start-up based outside Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire. Meanwhile, the SCC website is now just one of millions and is a far more conventional version of its former self.