Pinkham was well-known in South Africa’s tech circles for having founded the country’s the first commercial ISP in 1993 – The Internetworking Company of Southern Africa (Ticsa).
In late 2003, Pinkham and his colleague Benjamin Black presented a paper internally which shared a vision for Amazon’s retail computing infrastructure. The catalyst for this paper was Pinkham’s decision to move back to Cape Town from Seattle. Bezos wanted to keep Pinkham, which led to the discussion about the compute service.
“The project was un-staffed and undefined, so with some of the folks that I worked with in Seattle, we put together a proposal which described in very rudimentary terms the first compute service – the elastic compute cloud.”
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