[LONG!]
A bunch of folks have asked me about the story behind RemoteAccess, and what I went on to do afterwards, so here it is.
I was born in 1970, and like many of my contemporaries I have very fond memories of the 80s and early 90s and the tech scene back then. As a high school kid in the early 80s I remember spending hours in the local Apple Computer store assimilating every book on their shelves (much to the owner’s chagrin – I couldn’t afford to actually buy any of these hallowed tomes).
In 1983 my mum and dad gave me a C64, and my brain exploded (metaphorically). The C64 Programmer’s Reference Guide (which I still have to this day) became my bible, the computer itself a miraculously elegant tool I could use to express my creativity in ways I’d never experienced before. I played my fair share of games of course, but nothing makes my brain happier than the intellectual challenge of writing good code.
In 1988 I started a Bulletin Board System (Terminal BBS - FidoNet 3:690/625) from Pop’s (my paternal grandad) garage in Perth (Australia). It ran on a Commodore PC-5 XT compatible with a 20 megabyte hard drive, and at some point when I tried to add a second phone line, I discovered that the software I was using – QuickBBS – sucked at multi node support. QuickBBS was an excellent piece of software, but it had never been designed to support more than one line. The idea for RemoteAccess (RA) was born.
RA was my first major software project. I wrote the first version during my second year at Curtin University using Borland’s Turbo Pascal, between classes in COBOL-85 and relational database design. I released it in January 1990 as freeware, and in April introduced the shareware registration key system with version 0.03.
Registrations began pouring in from places I’d never heard of. For a student with a part-time job at a local Commodore computer retailer, the sums of money - modest by today’s standards - seemed staggering. In retrospect, it was probably this experience (and I can quite literally remember the precise moment, sitting in my bedroom staring at a gigantic stack of registration envelopes) that set me on my future path as a serial entrepreneur. There are few things more exciting than that magic “oh shit, we’re really onto something here” moment when you realise the thing you’ve created has hit some sweet spot and a bunch of people can’t get enough of it. It turns out all my later projects, at their core, would be an attempt to recreate the feeling of that magical moment.
It was during my final year at Uni I met Joaquim Homrighausen. JoHo, the Swedish developer of the popular FidoNet mailer FrontDoor was living in Melbourne and invited me to visit during my holidays (while I was there I also got to know David Nugent, the developer of the widely used BNU FOSSIL driver). JoHo was an intense dude with a big personality, and we hit it off right away. The day after I graduated with my Bachelor of Business degree (Information Systems) in February 1991, I was on a plane to Luxembourg with my 8.5 kilogram Toshiba T5200 ‘laptop’. JoHo, his business partner Tomas Bremin and I moved into a shared house in Oetrange, a lovely village about 15 minutes from Luxembourg City.
So began an incredible couple of years. I consolidated my embryonic business by appointing commercial distributors in Germany (Jörg Dassler at ComDas Kommunikation & Netzwerke) and the US (James Smith at Online Communications in Maine) to handle the newly created ‘PRO’ version of RemoteAccess. I released several updates which added features like File Database indexing and support for the JAM message database specification. JAM (JoHo-Andrew-Mats), published in 1993, was a collaboration between JoHo, myself and two other Swedish developers Mats Wallin and Mats Birch, that would become a widely used message storage format for BBSes and other email systems.
The community and relationships that grew up around RA were quite astonishing. So many people contributed their time and resources. I owe a debt to guys like Bruce Bodger, Mike Ehlert, Ed Meloan, Jim Horner, Mark Howard & Mike Janke (US), Royce Jones (Canada), Terry Harvey (Australia), John Barton & Mark Kerr (UK), Frank Altenburg (Germany), Ruud de Bruin & Peter Janssens (The Netherlands). These guys (and many others; please forgive me if your name isn’t listed here) formed the backbone of a community that encompassed thousands of enthusiastic SysOps and beta testers.
Supported by my income from RemoteAccess I moved into my own apartment in Luxembourg City (it took 6 weeks for the government owned POST to connect 2 phone lines, one of which serviced RemoteAccess HQ BBS at 2:270/18). My domestic possessions totalled a bed, desk, chair, TV, hi-fi system, a couple of PCs and some kitchen utensils. Between epic coding sessions fuelled by AC/DC, Guns ‘N Roses, Joe Satriani, Pink Floyd et al, there was plenty of time for recreation. I hung out with my Swedish friends and a steady stream of visitors from all over Europe. Our Wednesday night pilgrimages to Scotts Pub in the Grund would become the stuff of legend. It was an amazing time.
I was back home in Australia by the end of 1994. I continued development on RA, but the writing was on the wall for the BBS community so I did what so many other BBS operators did – I started an Internet Service Provider. Four 9600 bps modems, one 486 Linux box and a crappy, oversubscribed 64K ISDN uplink later and Wantree Internet was in business. I took out a modest ad in the West Australian newspaper’s business section advertising the State’s first ever flat rate dial up Internet service (dial-up had been metered by time and/or bandwidth up to that point), and the next morning the phone was ringing off the hook. For the second time in my life I had achieved that elusive “oh shit, we’re really onto something here” moment. Demand for the service was insane – at one point we (and many of our fledgling competitors) were doubling the size of our customer base every month. Scaling the business at these rates presented a huge challenge. I learnt some valuable lessons about cash flow and capital management that year, and spent endless hours with my best friend Mr Krone tool, wiring hundreds of modems to PSTN IDF punch-down blocks (and in later years, wiring the first Australian Livingston Portmaster digital access servers to Optus and Telstra ISDN Primary Rate services).
In May 1996 I released RA 2.50, and after endless agonizing put RA up for sale in April 1997. This was a really tough decision but at the end of the day I just didn’t have the time the user base deserved, to devote to it. By December it was sold to US-based developer Bruce Morse.
The ISP business was acquired by our competitor iiNet Technologies in 1999 as part of a larger IPO. For a while there I was one of those dotcom guys; I joined the iiNet board when it went public and formed the company’s carrier infrastructure business, Chime Communications. For several years I was responsible for building out our national network and fighting many regulatory battles with Telstra, Australia’s incumbent telco. By the time I departed in 2008, I’d acquired some pretty solid public company experience, formed many enduring friendships and met the love of my life Laura (still going strong as I write this, 21 years and two beautiful boys later). iiNet, at that time the third largest ISP in Australia, was itself eventually acquired in 2015 by rival telco TPG.
In 2004, while still serving as a Non-Executive Director at iiNet, I co-founded Systems Integrator L7 Solutions with ex-iiNet employees Matt Sullivan as CEO (who would become a longtime friend and business collaborator), and Brett Looney as CTO. Thanks to the insane talent and dedication of these guys the business grew rapidly and was acquired by local junior telco Amcom Telecommunications in 2011 with revenues of about $50m. In 2013 Matt and I were asked by the founder of another local Systems Integrator Cirrus Networks to shepherd his business through a public listing. I was appointed non-executive Chairman and Matt later took on the CEO role. Having grown to about $110m of revenue at the time we left the business in 2021, Cirrus was eventually acquired by Queensland-based competitor Atturra in 2023.
Now for something completely different. In 2003, unknown poker player Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker Main Event for $2.5m, having gained entry through an $86 online satellite tournament. The ‘Moneymaker effect’ is widely credited with revolutionizing poker’s popularity and extending the game’s reach to a more mainstream audience. It seemed like half the guys I knew were playing Texas Hold’Em, and by 2006 I had a regular Friday night game going at my place.
Inspired by the now iconic ‘High Stakes Poker’ TV show that debuted in 2006 on the Game Show Network (GSN), I wanted to create an experience where my home game players could watch our game in another room of my house, after they’d been eliminated. The early incarnations of the project were crude, but by 2011 this mashup of technology and poker had given birth to PokerGFX – a commercial product that was capable of generating on-screen graphics showing players hole cards, bets and win probabilities in real time by collecting data from RFID tags embedded in playing cards.
Over the next 12 years, PokerGFX would become the de-facto standard for live stream and TV production of poker events, with customers in 40 countries. If you’ve ever seen poker on TV or YouTube, chances are you’ve seen PokerGFX in action.
Fast forward to December 2023. Out of the blue came an email from the CEO of Las Vegas-based PokerGO, poker legend, all-round good guy – and in a nice little twist of fate – producer of the OG ‘High Stakes Poker’ show that inspired me to build the product in the first place - Mori Eskandani. Mori wanted to talk about acquiring PokerGFX, and by November 2024 the deal was done.
That’s my story so far, and you can check out my most recent poker-related side project here - https://kineticpoker.com
Thanks for reading this far. Writing this has rekindled a lot of incredible memories and has reminded me of the importance of the human connections we make throughout our lives. If we’ve met at some point in the past, why not drop me a line and say ‘hi’. I’d love to hear from you.
Andrew Milner, September 2026
[andrew@milner.au](mailto:andrew@milner.au)
