Tony Sanderson was one of those pioneering IT and internet people who secretly thought all this GUI stuff got in the way. He was rebellious, iconoclastic, painstaking and endlessly helpful. I got to know him when I spent an inspiring year at CSIRO Minerals, where he took me in although I was just passing through their scientific village.

He died suddenly a week ago. This is his obituary, written by and from from the hearts of those around him. Like him, I think it is pretty special. He was someone, you know?

“Minerals and CSIRO IT staff were shocked and deeply saddened to learn of the sudden and unexpected death of our friend and colleague, Tony Sanderson.

Employed originally at CSIRO Mineral Products in Port Melbourne in 1991, Tony moved across to Clayton (or Claytown, as he liked to call it) in 1997 following that division’s merger with Mineral & Process Engineering in 1995 (forming the present-day Minerals division). When CSIRO-IT was formed, Tony took on a dual role, working both on the business support team and directly with projects.

Besides providing invaluable IT support, Tony was Minerals’ own anthropologist, documenting the scientific and social life of the division through hundreds of hours of video footage. Minerals Chief Scientist John Rankin says, “Tony’s passion for video and film, and his efforts in recording many memorable events at our site, will be a lasting tribute to him.”

Indeed we’d often receive emails from night-owl Tony at strange hours, alerting us to the arrival on the intranet of footage from the latest seminar or staff party. Most of us have a collection of Tony-produced DVDs on our shelves. Working on “Tony Time” (ie 11am-ish until late at night), Tony would digitise his video footage, add specially selected soundtracks and distribute his masterpieces to those who starred in them. According to James Powell, Tony was aided by an ever-present thermos of coffee, his favourite drink.

Tony had many other passions in his life. Most prominent of these was his family: wife Anna and children Andy and Rosie. Ian Grey says, “He was devoted to them and was always talking about his interactions with them – particularly helping them with their studies.”

Nikki Scarlett’s favourite memory of Tony is an idea he gave her (which he has also documented on his website). “When his children were little, he recorded story-reading sessions with them, including their interjections and assorted noises. He used these tapes to pass the time on long car journeys. I have done this with my son and the resulting recordings are a real treasure and a source of great amusement for him as he grows up.”

Tony was very fond of coffee and was in charge of ordering it at the conclusion of the Port Melbourne crew’s regular Friday lunches (which continued long after they moved to Claytown). This important ritual involved Tony taking the ceremonial pen from Eric Frazer to write the order on a serviette. The serviette always had to be yellow, for maximum visibility. The order might read, “3 x Al, 2 x de Clerc and 1 x long mac” (”Al” for Al Pacino, or cappuccino; and “de Clerc” as in FW de Clerc, or flat white), and was always accompanied by a hand-drawn cartoon. The restaurant staff became trained in the system and accumulated quite a collection of Tony’s artwork.

Tony’s other great love was seafood. Andrew Smith remembers the time Tony ordered a seafood platter, not realising it was meant for two people. “I can picture him, with all the seafood utensils laid out, happily devouring the lot.”

Tony holds the dubious honour of being the first to implement on-line effort logging – a system begun at Minerals well before it became CSIRO policy. But it’s rumoured that he tempered this with some secret shortcuts for time-starved staff.

Tony was staunchly loyal, to both people and systems. This meant his enthusiasm for IT co-existed with a dislike of change – a combination with interesting results. He hated to see useful things become redundant and would cling to his favourite hardware, software and DOS command-line prompts long after their use-by dates. To the amused frustration of his team mates, Tony doggedly managed to keep the original server he used to set up Minerals’ effort logging system, Squirrel, going for more than 10 years – quite an achievement in the fast-changing world of IT.

Working on Tony Time, he was always the last to leave the IT office. Russell Mackinnon says, “I never locked up our room. So many nights I’d call out, ‘Cya, Tony’,. He’d rarely look up from his screen but he’d always answer with a slightly drawn out, ‘Well too-da-loo’ and sometimes, ‘”Well too-da-loo, MAC288′.”

Tony was a keen ham radio operator, home brewer, and a fervent Unix disciple who abhorred Windows. He was responsible for Friday Humour – a weekly email received directly by about 150 people and forwarded on to thousands more, and full of humourous reflections, jokes and the occasional stab at the corporate and political worlds. According to Ian Grey, Friday Humour “has kept us all sane and added some balance to the weekly grind.”

Russell Mackinnon says, “Tony was a dedicated, talented and creative IT professional who did his best to ignore the noise and just get on with it. But mostly Tony was a one-off, irreplaceable character who will be sorely missed by those who knew him.”

Ian Davidson reflects, “Tony was a cynic and well loved by all the rank and file. He helped people beyond the call of duty with their various computer problems.”

Adds Nikki Scarlett, “Tony was always up for a bit of fun and was a willing co-conspirator in any act of mischief that was being plotted.”

We’re going to miss Tony enormously – he was a warm, thoughtful, gentle man who captured the work and spirit of Minerals through his videos, and took our challenging IT conundrums personally, not resting until he solved them.

We’ll particularly miss his special chuckle, the shuffle of his desert boots as he moved through the corridors, his emails that always made you giggle (even when they were about mundane things), his pom-pommed hats, his sense of fun, and the wry smile and raised eyebrow he’d throw your way when something was up.

Too-da-loo, Tony.