Herman Heunis, the founder of Mxit, has died at 63

Jan

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Mxit founder Herman Heunis passes away

Mxit founder Herman Heunis passed away on Wednesday morning after a two-year battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 63.

The Namibian-born Heunis began his career in technology as a programmer in 1980 after studying for a BCom degree at Stellenbosch University.
 
Jees that app was so far ahead of its time. A true Symbian killer app.
Saved us a ton of money back in the days.

1661418904874.png

I used to sit and contemplate the skill and work that had to go into creating a separate build and release cycle for an app that supported most of the mainstream Symbian phones on the planet.

RIP
 
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Someone at the company once stole the L from the logo - not me - I only took the pic.

cockspeed-jpg.1068845
 
I met one of the MXit founder chaps in a amazon interview a while back, not sure who but it wasnt a young chap and they were in charge of the local EC2 and infrastructure side I beleive. Wonder if its the same gent.
 
Didn’t Mig33 in SA come out a few years after Mxit? Had both but Mxit was far more popular in my circles. It’s also what a lot of IRC people used. To me, Mxit is the OG.

Mig33 could sign into your MSN messenger which was pretty sweet back in the day.
 
I was at Maties 86 to 88. Don't remember him. Was he employed there or somewhere else from 1985?

RIP.
He worked at the Reken Sentrum as a sysadmin I think. I did my final year project at Engineering and had to engage with him a lot because I wrote a graphic front-end for the Spice circuit simulation tool that ran on MicroVax. We became friends and also with Jannie Nel, a colleague of his, which I believe was co-founder of SWIST.
Herman called me to interview as he was about to start Clockspeed. I asked him what SWIST stood for. He responsed "Somerset West Idiots Stand Together". Dunno if true or not, I don't know but both him and Jannie lived in SSW.
 
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