A shop sign, not a dashboard.
The road to Internet City.
This page is not a boast. It is a trail of machines, shops, networks, mistakes, repairs, service sheets, wireless links, old signs, and new beginnings.
Internet City did not appear from nowhere in 2026. It returned from a road that began with a VIC-20, books, patience, and the belief that technology should be understood, owned, repaired, and used in service of real people.
Early years: machines and method
Internet City did not begin in a boardroom or a pitch deck. It began with a young learner, a keyboard, a television screen, and the slow discovery that computers could be understood one line at a time.
At 11, the VIC-20 was the doorway. There was no search engine to ask and no tutorial feed to scroll. There were books, manuals, magazines, and patience: type, fail, read, fix, repeat.
At 13, the Commodore 64 expanded the world. Tape loading with the C2N Datasette was slow and noisy, then the 1541 floppy drive felt like a serious leap. One lesson stayed: storage matters, speed matters, and understanding what sits underneath matters most.
At 16, the Amiga 500 brought proper graphics, sound, and multitasking. It showed that computers are not just office boxes. They are workshops for creating, connecting, solving, and building.
Shops, networks, and field work
At 18 came S&P Computers in Calne, Wiltshire: counters, shelves, repairs, stock, phones, and real customers. This was practical service, not theory.
In the early Racal-Vodafone era, car phones were fitted before mobiles became everyday items. Then the 1991 recession closed that chapter, but not the technical road.
Around 2000 to 2008, InternetCITY and IT'S A COMPUTER SHOP moved online. The yellow-and-black sign was not web branding invented later; it was real shop identity carried onto the internet in the Metadot, Perl, and Web@Mail years.
Between 2004 and 2009 came SimplyWIFI: twelve hotspots across Worthing, Findon, Devils Dyke, and Washington Roundabout, with mesh work and point-to-point links reaching about 8.8 miles on 802.11b. Networks were hills, brackets, weather, antennas, and persistence, not slide diagrams.
From Computer Shop V2 to AKADATA
From 2010 to 2015, CSV2.co.uk (Computer Shop V2) marked another shop chapter: repairs, upgrades, builds, and service at scale. By closure, more than 5,000 machines had been built, repaired, serviced, or upgraded, with service sheets stacked high as proof.
In 2022, AKADATA LIMITED became the next formal chapter. Tooling changed, the web changed, and AI entered public view, but one policy stayed firm: use tools where useful, keep the customer relationship human, and avoid trapping people in systems they cannot leave.
On 30 May 2026, Internet City returned. Mail came back first, DNS was dressed properly, and modern mail foundations were restored: SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS, TLS reporting, and the first live mailbox.
The city has a postbox again. Mail first. Web next. Networks always.